
Class 

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LAME AND LOVELY 



BY THE SAME A UTHOR 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 
GOD AND DEMOCRACY 
BUSINESS AND KINGDOM COME 



LAME AND LOVELY 

ESSAYS ON RELIGION FOR 
MODERN MINDS 



BY 



FRANK CRANE 

Author of 
"Human Confessions" etc. 




CHICAGO 

FORBES & COMPANY 

1912 



vi\ 



Copyright, 1912 by 
Forbes and Company 



W A 6 * 

£C!.A816685 



THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 

Religion and the Modern Mind 

THE human race is incurably religious. 
We are more religious to-day than were 
the Puritans, the Crusaders, or the mediaeval 
ascetic orders. 

To see this we must understand what religion is. 
Religion is nothing more nor less than life, in itsT) itfwiL 
purest, most elemental form. 

Jesus, the greatest of religious teachers, never 
used the word religion : he spoke always of life^r^ 1 

It was the fortune, or misfortune, of the cult of 
Jesus to be taken up by the Latin world. 
, The genius of the Roman was organization. 
So the Roman world organized the Company of 
Jesus into the Church, patterned on Caesar's em- 
pire; and the teaching of Jesus it organized into a 
body of theology. 

It is interesting to speculate what the Christ 
Company on earth might have been, if it had re- 

7 



THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 

mained fluid, free, a spiritual leaven of open-eyed 
souls. 

What if they had remained simply the spirit- 
ually elect, putting away the lust of conquest, 
either temporal or otherwise, refusing all endow- 
ments of money, erecting no temples, refusing all- 
aid from the powers of this world, sticking stub- 
bornly to the programme of Jesus and Paul ? 

It is useless to inquire. Such was not the 
plan of destiny, which has its own strange, slow 
ways. 

Perhaps organization, institutionalism, and dog- 
ma, with their blinding quick success, are the 
kind of things the world can never understand ex- 
cept by living through them. Humanity had to 
have them, as a boy has to have the measles. 

The opening of the Twentieth Century is 
marked by a change in the expression of ethical 
feeling. 

The dynamic of Jesus is manifesting itself in 
terms of democracy, the removal of ancient priv- 
ileges, the general rise in importance of the com- 
mon people. 

Socialism spreads in Germany, republicanism 
bursts out in Portugal, the House of Lords is 
clipped of its power in England, even China is in 

8 



THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 

a ferment of democracy. Government every- 
where is feeling the sun-rays of Jesus' influence. 

In business more and more the principles of 
justice, and the claims of " one of the least of 
these/' characterize modern life. 

In literature the tendency is to study the com- 
mon lot, to reveal its divinity and dignity, as well 
as to put the best literature within the reach of the 
multitude. 

In art humanity is recognized in Millet and 
Israels, while only saints and kings were thought 
worth while by Rafael and Michelangelo. 

The great discovery of modern times is The 

People ' r "Vl 

All this is precisely the spirit of Jesus. The 

Puritan, monkish endeavor to attain individual 
holiness, and to develop the sensation of religious 
ecstasy, apart from the world, was a half-Jewish, 
half-heathen idea, into which the genial, out-of- 
doors and social Jesus never fit. 

With him religious emotion meant nothing aside 
from its altruistic vent. . 

Thinkers to-day, who have any sort of vision, 
are ceasing to confound Christianity with the 
Church. That was the mistake of most of the so- . 
called " infidels " from Voltaire to Ingersoll. 

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THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 

Grant that Christianity and any one or more 
organizations or theological schemes are identical, 
and at once Christianity is indefensible. 

It is only when we conceive Christianity to be 
a larger thing, a vast spiritual leavening, a kinetic 
spirit, of which the various churches are but one 
expression, but which in its entirety means apply- 
ing the wisdom and feeling of Jesus to govern- 
ment, business, work, amusement, and all life, that 
we grasp the significance of Christ. 

The Church, as John the Baptist, must say, 
facing him, " He must increase, and I must de- 
crease." 

The past deserves our reverence. It had its 
noble souls, its heroic ideas. 

The past is the mother of the present. Out of 
the womb of its purpose the present has come with 
great travail. And one should respect one's 
mother. 

But the past also must be criticised and judged, 
or we make no advance. We are to perceive and 
shun its mistakes, as every good son pleases his 
mother best in profiting by her experience. 

To imitate the past in evil as well as good, for 
fear of being irreverent, is to live in slavery. 

10 



THE AUTHORS FOREWORD 

Blind ancestor-worship means Chinese stagna- 
tion. 

With all respect, therefore, while we appreciate 
that vision of God which our forefathers had, rep- 
resented in such spiritual splendor as that of 
Francis of Assisi, yet for our own and for our chil- 
dren's sakes we must condemn their religion as 
nine parts heathenism and one part Christly. 

Through the murky air of monarchical ideas the 
pure ray of Jesus' democracy hardly pierced. 

The spiritual energy of this day takes a differ- 
ent direction from that which it took in the days 
before the dawn of democracy. We build no 
more cathedrals and monasteries; we build hos- 
pitals and public schools. 

We go no more on Crusades to rescue the tomb 
of the Saviour from the unbelievers; we march 
against life insurance companies and railway com- 
bines for the sake of " the little ones " with whom 
the Saviour identified himself. 

It is a fad to admire mediaeval faith, as we ad- 
mire mediaeval stained-glass and picturesque cas- 
tles. Carlyle and Chesterton both raise their 
voices to sing the glory of the " religious ages." 

But the sole advantage of those times over ours 
II 



THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 

is their perspective. It is " distance lends enchant- 
ment to the view." Study them, come close to 
them, and you will find that the religion of Dante's 
day, as Symonds said of its civilization, was 
founded on a dung-heap. 

Their theology was based upon intellectual dis- 
honesty. Their pious emotions were saturated 
with cruelty. Their faiths were the war-cries of 
party spirit. The religious wars in which they 
constantly engaged were infernal caricatures of 
that pure spiritual conquest Jesus set before him. 

The flavor of the religion of the past is incense. 
The flavor of modern religious life is soap. 

We are no more applying the gospel to the sur- 
face of the open sore of the world: we are treat- 
ing the cause. We do not display our love for 
mankind by largess to the picturesque beggars by 
the church door; we are patiently endeavoring to 
rearrange our business system and governmental 
system so that all may have a chance to work at 
living wages, and begging cease. 

To-day we also, " for Christ's sake," are widen- 
ing our parks, seeking to curb the irresponsible 
power of money, rescuing little children from 
stunting labor and putting them in free schools, 
giving women justice and equality instead of tyr- 

12 



THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 

anny garlanded with sensuous poetry, going to 
live in settlements in the slums instead of building 
missions there, cleaning up Havana and Panama 
instead of marching against yellow fever with a 
crucifix, circulating literature and establishing edu- 
cation among the masses to enable them to govern 
themselves instead of training a few to govern 
them. 

Never before in the history of the world were 
the fundamental principles of Jesus more appealed 
to. Never before have men so defied ancient and 
established fraud. Never has humanity seemed 
more worth while. Never have classes, castes, 
traditions and all vested humbuggery been so un- 
safe. 

Daily newspapers let the dread light of ex- 
posure through courts and camps. Demos has a 
thousand eyes. Kings and presidents, old fam- 
ilies and millionaires, must show cause before the 
fifteen cent magazines and the one cent dailies. 
The rats and bats that for ages have fattened on 
human weakness and ignorance are greatly dis- 
turbed. 

And what this age needs is to realize that this is 
Christianity! 

This is precisely what Jesus meant! 
13 



THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 

We are actually doing, unconsciously, and all 
the better so, the very business of Christ. 

For we read that when the young Nazarene 
came to his home town and entered the syna- 
gogue, the book of the prophet Isaiah was handed 
him, and when he had opened the book, he found 
the place where it was written : 

" The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because 
he hath anointed me to preach the good news to 
the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken- 
hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and 
recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them 
that are bruised." And he added, as he closed 
the book : " This day is this scripture fulfilled in 
your ears." 

Hundreds of earnest souls are doing this Christ- 
work who are under the dominance of the tradi- 
tional notion that Christ is only to be found 
in some provincial, narrow organization. They 
need to realize that they, too, are of the Christ 
Company. They need to sing the ancient can- 
ticle : 

Doubtless, O God, thou art our Father, 
Though Abraham be ignorant of us, 
And Israel acknowledge us not. 



THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 

It is they who form the real, invisible Church. 

That Church is inherently unorganizable. To 
organize means to go in for money, influence and 
other forms of power over men aside from pure 
character, spiritual, personal influence. 

You cannot organize religion any more than 
you can organize poetry. 

No money ever helped Jesus' work in the world, 
no authority ever furthered it ; just as no money or 
authority can hinder it. 

The Church of Jesus is not " a mighty army." 
The whole military analogy stinks of cheap suc- 
cess. 

All " campaigns," all efforts to raise money, to 
multiply church members, and otherwise to ad- 
vance the cause of Jesus, as we would advance the 
cause of some candidate for President, displays a 
blindness to Jesus' very nature and oft-repeated 
notions. 

For, if you ask him, he tells you that his 
triumph is like a seed growing secretly, a lump of 
leaven, the coming of the wind; and he will tell 
you to beware of money, to refuse the seats of 
high authority. 

Against the mighty organization of the Roman 
empire he set his personality alone. It was 

15 



THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 

enough. The golden thrones have been tumbled 
down; the thunder of the legions is forever still; 
but the personality of the wise and gentle Son of 
Man is the most powerful force in humanity now, 
two thousand years after. 

Why can we not understand this? Religion is 
adjectival: it is not a noun. It is the quality of 
our work; it is not some special work. It is the 
tune of all deeds; it is no particular set of deeds. 

The essays in this book are not to church mem- 
bers. They are to human beings. 

They were not spoken in any temple ; they were 
first printed in a newspaper. 

In provincial days the church bell rang, and the 
neighbors gathered in the meeting house, which 
thus was the symbol of communal righteousness 
and aspiration. 

To-day the ends of the earth are neighbors, by 
the printed page. The new congregation gathers 
about the newspaper, for better or for worse. 

I am inclined to fancy that if Jesus were to come 
to-day he would come into the columns of the 
daily paper, and speak there, amidst the cries of 
advertisers, the contention of politics, the antics of 
the joke-makers, the parade of business; for there 
he would find that same common people that once 

16 



THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 

" heard him gladly " in the streets of Jerusalem 
and the by-ways of Galilee. For his message is 
not of the temple, but of the street. 

In the name and spirit of Jesus therefore I send 
these little preachments to the common folks, to all 
those who for one reason or another are groping, 
in the hope that something herein may make again 
clear and dear to them those evergreen spiritual 
truths and emotions which are the chief beauty of 
souls. 

The River of God runs through the streets of 
the city. 

For a Chicago newspaper I once wrote, concern- 
ing Jane Addams of Hull House : 

44 There is a river the streams whereof 
Make glad the City of God." 
I went through death to find this thing 
And all through heaven I trod. 

Now heaven's a wide and wonderful place, 

But the people are much as we, 
So I came back home in sorrow and thirst, 

And there one said to me: 



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THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 

" O fool, you have traveled far to find 

What youVe crossed over time and again ; 
For the River of God is in Halsted Street 
And is running black with men." 

"Then maybe Chicago's the City of God? " 

Said I. " Perhaps/' said he; 
" For to find that City you need no wings 

To fly, but eyes to see. 

" And low in the rushes the river sings, 
And sweet is its spirit lure, 
For it waters the joys of loving and living 
That grow in the hearts of the poor." 

So I took me a place in the City slums 
Where the River runs night and day, 

And there I sit 'neath the Tree of Life 
And teach the children to play. 

And ever I soil my hands in the River, 

But ever it cleans my soul; 
As I draw from the deep with the Silver Cord, 

And I fill the Golden Bowl. 



18 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Author's Foreword — Religion and the Modern 

Mind 7 

Lame and Lovely 21 

The Universal Creed 26 

Friendship 31 

Preparation 35 

The Insight of Love 39 

Man Is a Spirit 43 

The Waste in Hate 47 

The Escape From Self 51 

The Love of Woman . . 55 

The Mother of Evil 59 

Money . 63 

Points of Social Decay 67 

Redemption by Self-Respect . . 71 

The Simplicity of Masters 75 

The Reserves 79 

Fermenting Thoughts 83 

Religious Value of a Sense of Humor 87 

The Difference Between Good and Bad ...... 91 

Childlikeness and Childishness 95 

Prayer 101 

The Sin of Sensitiveness 105 

They All Do It 109 

The Practical Uses of Death 113 

19 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Otherworldliness 117 

The Sermon of the Clock 121 

On Going to Church 127 

The Eye of the Soul 132 

Loving God 136 

Thei Uses of Confession 141 

The Heart of Fatalism .146 

A Preachment to Preachers 151 

Beyond the Grave 155 

Yoke Joy 160 

The Soul Laocoon 165 

The Center of Things 170 

The Three Sphinxes by the Road ....... 175 

The House on the Rock . . 179 

The Declaration of Independence ....... 183 

Salvation by Responsibility 187 

Love the Test of Life 191 

The Teeth and Claws of Altruism 195 

Imitation in Religion . . .199 

Do the Meek Make Good? 203 

Widening . 207 

Jesus Out of Doors 211 



20 



LAME AND LOVELY 

And in the archives of heaven I had grace to 
read, how that once the angel Nadir, being exiled 
from his place by mortal passion, upspringing on 
the wings of parental love, appeared for a brief 
instant in his station, and, depositing a wondrous 
birth, straightway disappeared. And this charge 
was the selfsame babe who goeth lame and lovely. 

— Charles Lamb. 

AT first thought we seem to be drawn toward 
one another by our excellences, but a little re- 
flection will convince us that our truest attraction 
lies in our defects. 

Man's u lower nature " has come in for hard 
knocks by nearly all moralists, but it is none the 
less the cement of our sociality. 

As humanity is now constructed, it is hard to see 
how there could be any love, any family life, or 
anything at all, in life or literature, except the 
drabs and grays, were it not for the much berated 
animalities. 

21 



LAME AND LOVELY 

We speak of " the communion of saints," but is 
there not also a communion of sinners — are we 
not bound together by our lapses? 

I do not write this in praise of immorality. I 
am no " devil's advocate." Over and over again, 
whoever speaks of moral laws at all must sound 
the warning that what he says must not be carried 
too far; that, no matter what his truth, it is but 
half the truth; the other half abiding in the com- 
mon sense, balance, and judgment of the reader's 
mind. 

And truly this unity in fault may be pushed to 
the extreme indicated by Hawthorne in his " Mar- 
ble Faun," where he speaks of the brotherhood of 
crime, and how all murderers, for instance, from 
them that slew Caesar by Pompey's pillar to the 
last blood-guilty wretch named in to-day's paper, 
have joined invisible hands in spiritual kinship. 

But the truth of which I speak is to be taken 
with care and niceness. Using thus due discrimi- 
nation, we can get good out of the fact that prac- 
tically all loveliness is lame. 

Love does not leap toward perfection ; it clings 
to imperfections. No class is so universally loved 
as babies, who are most incomplete. It is their 
helplessness that appeals; and all our affection 

22 



LAME AND LOVELY 

rushes forth in response. So also a mother will 
love a crippled child more than a sound one. 

Have you never observed how a little weakness 
in a hero brings him near? That story telling of 
Lincoln, which was the main accusation against 
him his enemies made, endeared him to the peo- 
ple. And not a little of his hold upon our tender- 
ness is due, I believe, to his most unprepossessing 
of faces. 

Washington never made a neater stroke to con- 
quer " the hearts of his countrymen " than when 
he lost his temper that time in battle, and said 
things that are expurgated from school histories. 

Whoever construes this as a recommendation of 
evil misses the point. For the point, the moral 
bearing, is this: That no person should lose heart 
and hope because of his mistakes. Slips, errors, 
and sins have the quality of lovely lameness only 
in those who struggle against them and fall be- 
cause of their humanity. Not to struggle, but to 
turn and love and follow evil for its own sake, is 
not human at all ; it is devilish. 

To err is human, but not wholly. What 19 
really human is to err and hate it ; to sin and loathe 
ourselves for it, to slip and to be ashamed of our 
slipping. 

23 



LAME AND LOVELY 

And it is in this battling, this Alp-climbing, that 
characterizes the human soul, that its loveliness in- 
heres. We admire those who are on the heights; 
we love those who are scrambling up, with torn 
hands, bleeding knees, doubting hearts, spent 
breath, full of fears — but climbing, climbing ! 

John has a light-giving saying: " Herein is 
love; not that we loved God, but that He loved 
us." Love is always from the higher to the lower, 
from the more to the less perfect. So the Christ 
was called " the Friend of Sinners." 

Any soul that has genuine greatness, the kind of 
holiness that springs from grandeur of soul in- 
stead of from refined egoism, will ever be smitten 
with love toward the weak and passion cursed, and 
not with disgust. It is the mark of Jesus' majesty 
that he was drawn so mightily to our foolish and 
vice-shot humanity. Contempt has no place in a 
soul that loves. 

How vain, then, our fears that our dead, who 
have been long in the pure perfection of heaven, 
may despise us! Directly the contrary! for the 
nobler they grow, by the side of him who loved 
the weak and wicked with so miraculous a passion, 
under his tutelage who put the sign of the cross 
upon the divine stooping to our lowliness, the 

24 



LAME AND LOVELY 

nobler they become, I say, and the more they 
learn of the inward mystery of love, the more they 
stoop to kiss our blind eyes and to bathe our 
twisted wills and lusts with their tears. 

11 Lame, lame ! " cry out all the heavenly host 
as they see this toiling band of mortals painfully 
writhing up the slopes of light, " lame — and 
lovely!" 



25 



THE UNIVERSAL CREED 

Chi non stima la vita, non la merita. — He who 
does not value life, does not deserve it. — Leon- 
ardo da Vinci. 

Men should be judged, not by their tint of skin, 
The Gods they serve, the vintage that they 
drink, 
Nor by the way they fight, or love, or sin, 
But by the quality of thought they think. 

— Lawrence Hope. 

IN the one universal church to which all good 
men belong, composed of those of all faiths 
who honestly live up to the best they know, 
whether Christian or pagan, Jew or Gentile, Cath- 
olic or Protestant, there is a certain fundamental 
creed. This, the greatest common divisor of all 
creeds, may be thus stated : 

i. The good man sees, acknowledges, and be- 
lieves in, first of all, the difference between right 
and wrong. When the word ought disappears 
from one's vocabulary he may be sure of moral 

26 



THE UNIVERSAL CREED 

decay. The one man abominable to any decent 
society is the man who thinks nothing matters. 
We can tolerate one, even, who doubts there is a 
God; but if one believes there is no line between 
right and wrong, then, as Dr. Johnson said, " let 
us count our spoons when he leaves." 

2. The good man believes that happiness will 
come to him, permanently, and as a law, only as he 
practices doing right. Joy, peace, and Miss are 
not to be cozened nor juggled from God or nature, 
but are the sure portion of them that persistently 
do what they think right. Doing right, of course, 
does not always bring money or fame or other ex- 
ternal desired things, but it brings peace and poise 
to the soul, as surely as three times five make fif- 
teen. There are no more exceptions to this rule 
than to a law of physics or of geometry. The 
cosmic accuracy runs in spiritual as well as in ma- 
terial things. 

3. The good man's duty (in which he finds hap- 
piness) is first of all to develop his personality. 
God made him for a purpose ; his joy will consist 
in finding and fulfilling that purpose. He is not 
to be some one else, not to copy; but, using all mas- 
ters, to become more and more himself. 

4. It is his duty to be strong. He can be of use 

27 



LAME AND LOVELY 

to others only as he has force in himself. He, 
therefore, shuns all things that tend to weaken his 
arm, his brain, or his heart. 

5. His duty is to be clean. This item of the 
creed is oldest and newest; oldest, in that cleans- 
ings were a part of every early religion, the com- 
mands of Moses, for instance, abounding in lustral 
rites; newest, in that the one lesson of modern 
science is the power and safety of the antiseptic 
life. The devil's name, as far as bodily health 
and mental clearness and spiritual vigor is con- 
cerned, is dirt. Dirt is the one enemy to be hated 
with all one's soul and to be fought unto one's last 
breath. 

6. His duty is to be brave. The basic sin of 
all sins is cowardice. The higher the realm of 
life in which we move the more dangerous is any 
kind of fear. And the most deadly of all fears 
is the fear of the truth, or the fear for the truth. 
Any man or institution that fights to preserve him- 
self or itself, for the sake of " expediency," that 
is to say, for fear the truth might do harm, any 
man or institution, in the words of Zangwill, that 
proposes to live and die in " an autocosm without 
facts," is doomed. 

7. His duty is to love. Although, according 

28 



THE UNIVERSAL CREED 

to the foregoing points in the creed, he is to de- 
velop self and be clean, brave, and strong, yet he 
is to find his motive for all this and the end for 
which he does all this, outside and not inside of 
himself. It is at this point that he rises, like an 
aeroplane leaving the runway on the ground and 
soaring aloft; here the man leaves the company 
and similitude of all other creatures. In his 
power to be actuated by unselfish motives he be- 
comes as a god compared to the beasts. He lives 
for his wife, his children, his friends, his country, 
his race; so, in widening waves his radio-dynamic 
flows. The good man, therefore, hates no living 
creature. He despises no human being. In him 
is a centrifugal power outflowing to inundate the 
universe. 

8. From this love arise all graces and virtues 
as naturally as peaches grow from peach trees. 
Loving all he cannot soil a soul, nor wrong a fel- 
low being, nor hurt wantonly, nor usurp, nor push 
for precedence, nor be unkind, nor in any way drift 
into the low, poison life of egoism. 

9. His one aim, last of all, is to serve. Strong 
in himself, fearless and loving, he arises at length 
to the platform where stands he who was called 
14 the first born among many brethren." He is 

29 



LAME AND LOVELY 

the Master's companion and also can put away all 
cheap success, all luxuries of greed and dominance, 
and repeat his Master's words : " Let him who 
would be greatest among you be servant of all. 
I, too, come not to be ministered unto, but to 
minister." Over his grave may be inscribed what 
Anthony said of Brutus: 

His life was gentle, and the elements 

So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up 

And say to all the world, " This was a man ! " 



30 



FRIENDSHIP 

/ call you not servants, but friends. — Jesus. 

WHEN a man says friendship I think he 
utters the deepest word in human speech. 
It ranks even a little higher than love, being a sort 
of unselfed love, love with the itch and hunger 
extracted. 

We do not love our friends ; we like them. We 
love our children, wife and parents, and kinsfolk. 
We like apples and custard pie and a cozy fire and 
a good bed and slippers — and our friend. 

Like goes farther in than love. Like is a voice 
from the subconscious self, a cry from the inward 
and unknown me. It lies behind the will, beneath 
the judgment, in the far darkness of our secret 
soul. 

It does not say that a wife cannot be also a 
friend; but she rarely is; she is usually an enemy, 
to whom we are most passionately attached. And 
if she be a friend, then that friendship has grown 
up from other sources, and is of a different texture 

31 



LAME AND LOVELY 

and quality from the sex motives which make mar- 
riages. Not many women would tolerate com- 
radeship from a husband. Perhaps this is as it 
should be, and nature needs fiercer fires for her 
necessary results. 

Still rarer is friendship between parent and 
child. It is an amazing thing I have noticed here, 
how warm, intelligent and cultured father and son 
both strive for friendship and cannot attain it. 
Sometimes they succeed, but so rarely that it may 
be called a phenomenon. 

Whence, then, come friends? And who are 
they? And how can one make them? All an- 
swers to these pathetic questions seem to me to be 
unsatisfactory, partial, insufficient, and by the way. 
The rules of the wise will not work. We do not 
make friends by being noble and good; friendship 
does not arise from similarity of tastes ; and other- 
wise one can, in actual experience, drive a coach 
and four through all and any of the prescriptions 
of the proverbial philosophers. 

The fact is that the secret springs of friendship 
are wholly mysterious. Searching for them we 
must report like the Louisiana sheriff reported on 
the back of a writ " duces tecum " which he had 
been given to serve upon a negro who had escaped 

32 



FRIENDSHIP 

into the swamp : " Non comattibus, up stumpum, 
in swampo." As I look over my friends I find 
I like them as a dog likes his master. So I con- 
clude that this emotion must originate in some 
Newfoundland or St. Bernard region of my na- 
ture, and is probably one of those instincts not yet 
eliminated by evolution, something I share with 
dogs. 

For all that I honor it as the best thing I am 
conscious of. I am prouder of liking my friends 
than of any other of my small bunch of virtues. 
When I think of Bill and Lige and Al and Ralph 
and Newt I get a kind of warmth about the cockles 
of my heart no other contemplation can produce. 

And the bitterest hurts I have ever felt are 
those made by the disloyalty of others whom I 
thought friends and trusted. Nothing is so salt 
and nauseous to the soul as the taste of Judas in 
the mouth of memory. 

And it seems to me — for this, after all, is a 
sermon — that religion, rightly taken, is rather a 
friendship for God than a love to God; and that 
we would better translate all the Bible's admoni- 
tions to love God by the paraphrase to be friends 
with God. 

To love God has a conventional sound; but to 
33 



LAME AND LOVELY 

be a friend of God — that is a searching and 
swordlike word. It means to like Him; not to 
avoid Him; to seek His presence; to be at home 
with Him; to be cheered, consoled, quieted by the 
thought of Him. 

Speaking for myself, I can say that I never came 
into this comfortable relationship until I had swept 
away all I had ever been taught, dared to presume 
upon the debt God had incurred toward me by 
making me, and took my rightful place as His son 
at His table. 

It does not require any assumption of holiness 
or sinlessness to do this ; it only needs to presume 
upon the vast noble-mindedness, kindness, and for- 
bearing wisdom of such a heart as Jesus reveals 
to us. It requires a tremendous burst of moral 
courage to believe God likes the kind of man I 
am; but I do believe it; and the result is the great- 
est ethical dynamic of my life — the friendship of 
God. 



34 



PREPARATION 

Before an artist can do anything the instrument 
must be tuned. — Henry Drummond. 

ONE way to open a locked door is to fall at it 
and scratch, kick, and shove! A better 
way is to get the key. 

In other words, pluck and force and will power 
are all right in their place, but they are far from 
being the only secret of success. They are down- 
right silly without — preparation. 

Knowing how is half the battle. Practice and 
study count. Skill and efficiency mean a long time 
getting ready. We are familiar enough with this 
truth in ordinary matters. We send boys to 
school and prentices to the shop, and would-be 
stenographers to night school. For we recognize 
that the untrained man these days has to get off 
the earth, there's no room for him. But we often 
fail to carry this primitive common sense over into 
the more serious concerns. We forget that one 
also has to learn — how to live. One cannot go 

35 



LAME AND LOVELY 

at it tooth and nail. It is not to be stormed, 
forced, and stampeded. It takes science, training, 
and practice. 

The learning how is hard, always ; but essential. 
The only things one can do without practice are 
over-eating, over-drinking, laziness, bad temper, 
selfishness, and general meanness, also uselessness. 
But the good things come hard. Take humility, 
rarest and noblest of virtues. The only road to 
humility is by being humiliated, which hurts. 

The only way to patience is by self-restraint un- 
der irritation. If there is nothing to gnaw and 
worry and heckle us, then we never learn that beau- 
tiful art of patience. The only path to belief, 
that is, to the only kind of belief that is of any use 
to character, is through doubt. Faith is a product 
that is ground out of the mill of dismay, confusion, 
despair and struggle. Intellectual assent is cheap. 
The confidence that is a triumph of the soul over 
pessimism and fatuous reasonings is worth some- 
thing. 

The only means toward rest is work. It is to 
tired bones the bed tastes sweet. The soul can 
never enjoy letting go that has never hung on. 
Real placidity is the product of strenuosity. 

So also the preparation for knowledge is love. 

36 



PREPARATION 

Truth is not a lump of something a man may go 
and pick up. Truth is not any thing at all. It is 
relation, a quality, a shine, an odor. It is not per- 
ceived by the intellect; it is perceived by the heart; 
the intellect merely criticises and classifies it. The 
secret of Edison's discoveries, and of Koch's, and 
of Marconi's, is love. Only love can see. It has 
the X-ray eye. And this is true in business, or 
science, or literature, or art, quite as much as in 
religion. Brains can amass truths and pigeonhole 
them and arrange them; only passion of some sort 
can find them out where they are hidden. 

Sorrow, disappointment, heartbreak, bereave- 
ment, all such things are the anterooms of great- 
ness. There is a state into which a man can grow 
where he resembles an ordinary man about as much 
as a fine thoroughbred horse resembles a broken- 
down hack horse, or as a big American beauty 
rose resembles a dusty weed. Nobleness of char- 
acter, grandeur of soul, sweetness of spirit, no one 
can get these without being prepared. 

Some of us have the ignorant notion that we 
could be noble if we cared to make the effort. 
We are like the man who, when asked if he could 
play the violin, said he didn't know — he'd never 
tried. 

37 



LAME AND LOVELY 

What a deal of getting ready to live is needed ! 
A man never really learns how to live till he's 
ready to die. And if with most of us, all of us, 
life is a mighty getting ready, then it is a getting 
ready for — what? 

It is this tremendous question that unlocks the 
door of death and gives us our surest hope of the 
life beyond. 



38 



THE INSIGHT OF LOVE 

Faithfulness to us in our faults is a certain sign 
of fidelity in a friend. — J. G. Holland. 

T OVE has been called blind. That is because 
JL/ it will not and cannot see faults. 

So men have despised love and boasted of intel- 
lect, which, they say, can discern the truth better. 
And herein men simply display their ignorance 
and show that they do not know what truth is nor 
what knowing is. 

For a living truth, or the truth about a living 

thing, was never yet perceived by any brain* 

I Mind can see dead truths, such as that two and 

two make four, or that here is a book and there 

is a man, and all such things that have to do 

merely with material and inanimate propositions; 

L but truths that grow in the human spirit are only 

Visible to the eye of love. 

t Whoever loves, sees; and whoever sees, sees 
jonly things lovely. For the soul of a human being 

39 



LAME AND LOVELY 

I is essentially beautiful, and only the love ray can 
/ reveal it. 

This is proved by the fact that wherever we find 
love in its purest and intensest form you find al- 
ways that it has this glorifying effect. In three in- 
stances you will find love at its best. 

First, in the love of a mother for her young 
child. This affection cannot see evil. The 
mother kisses the crippled feet, yearns over the 
weak will, and sees beneath all naughtiness to a 
substratum of charm that is invisible to you and 
me. 

Second, in the first love of a man and a maid. 
Here Puck has squeezed upon their eyes the juice 
of that same flower he used to make the fairy 
queen love the clown with an ass's head. No mat- 
ter how gross or common to our unlit eyes the girl 
may be, her lover thinks her an angel. So this sex 
love, when raised to its spiritual potency, is the 
most wonderful of all discoveries. To the infat- 
uated lover she has no faults ; they are but eccen- 
tricities of divinity no one but he understands. 
He would not change her in any least way, lest 
she should cease to be she, and so be less a miracle. 
This is not folly, nor blindness. It is insight. 
For any one of us is precisely so beautiful and 

40 



THE INSIGHT OF LOVE 

glorious and majestic, if any one could be found 
who would love us enough to detect it. 

For awhile, at least, it is given to us, in the 
passion of youth, to see another soul as angels see 
souls. There never yet was love enough in this 
world. God send more! And to any lover we 
may speak those words of Wordsworth : 

Thou blest philosopher who yet dost keep 
Thy heritage ; thou eye amongst the blind, 

That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, 
Haunted forever by the eternal Mind! 

The third instance is God's love for the human 
soul. The revelation of this, the emphasis he 
placed upon this, is Jesus' chief contribution to the 
happiness of the race. For, singularly enough, the 
reverse of all the creeds, is truer than the creeds. 
God's faith in me is more saturated with redemp- 
tive potency than my faith in Him. The thought 
that infinite goodness can and does love me is the 
flame that lights my love to Him ; as it is written : 
" The spirit of a man is the candle of the Lord." 

What the world needs is trust, or rather to be 
trusted. Slowly and through painful years and 
centuries of intellectual stupidity we are to learn 
that children are to be made better by believing in 

41 



LAME AND LOVELY 

them and appreciating them rather than by flog- 
ging and scolding; that criminals can only be cured 
by trusting them, never by punishing them; that 
nations are best conquered by disarmament and 
defenseless confidence, more certainly than by 
armies; and that sinful men are to be won to 
worship and morality by revealing to them through 
love their own dignity as God's beloved, rather 
than by threats and curses ; that while Sinai and the 
white thunders of the law drive men to despair, 
Calvary and the revelation of divine love lift 
them to nobleness. 

\ Love is not blind. Love is the only thing that 

I sees. 



42 



MAN IS A SPIRIT 

My little spirit, see, 

Sits in a foggy cloud and stays for me. 

— Macbeth. 

The final goal of all true culture is the liberation 
of man from the " sensual gravitation >f which 
every one experiences in himself. Essentially as 
a creature of the senses man begins his course in 
this world, essentially as a creature of the spirit he 
should finish it here, and, as we hope, continue it 
in another world under more favorable conditions. 

— Carl Hilty. 

**y^lOD is a spirit," said the Master, but for 
VJF that matter man is a spirit also. We are 
all " spooks." The Bible says that no man hath 
seen God at any time, neither hath any man at any 
time ever seen a man. We are kin mysteries to 
Deity. 

Carlyle relates how old Dr. Samuel Johnson, 
the grand mogul of English literature, used to go 
poking about strange places in Cock Lane looking 

43 



LAME AND LOVELY 

for ghosts when all the while the streets were full 
of them, had he but known it; he jostled them 
daily in the thoroughfare, and the good doctor was 
himself a wraith, in a substantial envelope to be 
sure. 

Because you have seen my clothes and face and 
hands is no proof you have sttn me. I have never 
even found myself. 

The first and most pregnant of truths is that 
we are essentially spirits, and we come into the 
better quality of living only as we recognize this 
fact and cultivate our spiritual nature. " To be 
carnally minded is death," said St. Paul, " but to 
be spiritually minded is life." 

We enter the world as little animals; we ought 
to go out of it great spirits. An old man should 
be more beautiful than a baby, for the baby is 
but a charming animal, while the old man may be 
a lofty, wondrous, fascinating soul. That this is 
not the rule and that we dread old age shows that 
we have not yet learned what it is to live, nor real- 
ized the value of character. 

To live, in the fullest sense of the word, is to 
find our aims and enjoyments in the spiritual 
plane. But spirituality must not be too narrowly 
defined. It does not mean an absorption in reli- 

44 



MAN IS A SPIRIT 

gious emotions. That is only one phase of it and 
too often overemphasized. 

Whatever sets our pleasures over from the body 
to the mind, from the flesh to the spirit, belongs 
to our spiritual assets and helps give life poise and 
permanence and the quality of immortality. 

The American people do not yet fully appre- 
ciate the moral and civic value of the arts. We 
regard music and painting as mere amusements, 
good for those who happen to like that sort of 
thing. They rank a little higher than baseball. 
But we are mistaken. They belong to the assets 
of civilization. They assist in redeeming a nation 
from brutishness, from the rule of coarse lust, 
greed, luxury, and bloodthirstiness. They are a 
part of the " kingdom of heaven." 

The love of nature, the power to get satisfac- 
tion out of the contemplation of the blue mystery 
of the lake, the splendid spectacle of the night sky 
and the stars, the loveliness of leaf, and tree and 
flower, the imposing majesty of mountains, the 
calm of rivers, and the moods of the great ocean 
are also distinct aids in bringing our lives up out 
of the slough of mere bodily desires. 

Not that the body's appetites are wicked. 
They are good. God made them. But He also 

45 



LAME AND LOVELY 

made hogs. They are simply low. They are 
good only as they are kept in their place. And 
more and more, as life unfolds, they should fall 
away. And they will if you control them and dis- 
cipline them. All their fiery forces will pass over 
into soul power just as the rotting mold sends its 
filthy juices into the plant stem to rise and become 
white lily petals bearing fragrance. 

Thus beginning as animals we work our way 
up to our inherited privilege as spiritual beings in 
the wide, beautiful, and healthful sense of the 
word. By cultivating the mind, by science, by art, 
by music, by the love of nature, by intercourse with 
high-minded persons, we ascend out of the dirt 
into the sunlight of life. 

Nothing is so valuable to assist us in this as an 
intelligent appreciation and reverence for God. 
We ought to recognize His spirit in His universe 
just as we recognize a man's spirit in his body. 
Out of a rational, sensible religion, communion 
with God and with good people we get what we 
find nowhere else, a constant nourishment for 
truth, love, honor, self-control, hope, and optimism 
in our hearts. 



46 



THE WASTE IN HATE 

But I say unto you, love your enemies. — Jesus. 

ONE of the most luminous observations upon 
hatred is that of Baudelaire: " Hatred is 
a precious liquor, a poison dearer than that of the 
Borgias, because it is made of our blood, our 
health, our sleep, and two-thirds of our love." 

The main point to know about hate is that it 
does not pay. It is pure waste. It exhausts our 
vital forces and gives us nothing in return. 

Baudelaire well calls it poison. For of all pas^ 
sions that lodge in the soul it has the most septic, 
heady, and yeasty quality. If we really hate a 
man, we ought to hate him too much to hate him. 

That is, we should not be willing to give him 
the pleasure of making us unhappy; and we can 
surely cause him more discomfort, if he bears us 
genuine ill will, by letting him see that he cannot 
disturb our peace. 

Why should I let my enemy rob me of my 
sleep? Why, for his sake, should I indulge in 

47 



LAME AND LOVELY 

thoughts that are to me as black coffee at bedtime 
and give me a " white night "? I shall put aside 
all feeling about him, even if it takes as much 
moral effort as a drunkard needs to refuse his 
liquor. 

The word of Emerson, speaking of Lincoln, is 
to me the ideal of manhood, freed by its very 
greatness from the self-torture of resentment: 
41 His heart was as large as the world, yet it had 
no room in it for the memory of a wrong." 

More practical, more mundane, perhaps, but 
not less forceful, was the remark of the late Paul 
Morton, who answered, when asked if he did not 
like to " get even " with any one who had done 
him wrong: " I haven't time. I am too busy." 

A friend was once swindled out of $5,000 by a 
rascal whom he had trusted. To the surprise of 
every one, he made no effort to prosecute the man. 
One of his friends asked him why it was that he 
did not take steps to get justice. 

" Well," said he, " it's this way: If I should 
go to law I could possibly regain my money and 
punish the fellow ; but it would take me about two 
years to get the case through all the courts, and in 
the meantime a world of hard feelings and feuds 
would be created. Now, I figure that I can make 

48 



THE WASTE IN HATE 

that five thousand, and more, by strictly attending 
to my business for those two years, and feel a 
whole lot better." This, I take it, is as good 
philosophy as was ever uttered in Greece. 

To get rid of hate and its spendthrift results 
upon us, we must live upon the heights. It is all a 
question of the plane upon which our daily think- 
ing and feeling take place. To bear grudges, to 
harbor bitter animosities, to wish evil to any man, 
to look and hope for disaster to any creature, is to 
dwell in the lowlands, in the miasmatic swamps of 
life, and to breathe febrile and malarious vapors. 

If we can, by a moral effort, pull ourselves up 
to the mesa, the highlands, where move such 
figures as Antoninus and Lincoln and Jesus; if we 
can rise thus to the point where we can feed our 
enemy if he hunger and give him drink if he thirst, 
we have the double satisfaction of triumphing over 
him, which is pleasant, and over ourselves, which 
is an infinitely greater pleasure. 

Dr. Holmes calls argument the " hydrostatic 
paradox of fools " — that is, as water rises to the 
same level in a small tube as in a large reservoir 
with which it is connected, so to argue with a fool 
is to put him on your level. " And," he adds, 
" the fools know it! " 

49 



LAME AND LOVELY 

So anger and hate and all such heat against 
wrongdoers might be called " the hydrostatic para- 
dox of malice/' for to fall into bad blood against 
the man who has done us evil is to descend to his 
plane and to share with him his devil's brew of 
malignity. 

Hate is destructive. Love is creative. Every 
angry feeling tears down something in us. Every 
emotion of love hardens our life fiber. In all an- 
imal life love is the creative instinct and hate seeks 
annihilation. Nowhere does the pure wisdom of 
Jesus shine more refulgently than where he says 
(and he practiced it) : " Love your enemies." 



50 



THE ESCAPE FROM SELF 

Speak to the children of Israel, saying, Appoint 
out for you cities of refuge. — Joshua, xx, 2. 

Every individual soul has a history very similar 
to that of society. — Carducci. 

AMONG the ancient Jews they had cities of 
refuge. The rash murderer, not with mal- 
ice aforethought, might flee to any one of these 
and be safe from the wrath of the avenging kin. 
They were a wise people who thus had prevision 
and made provision for their own weakness. 

For a man's intelligence may be better gauged 
by his knowledge of his own shortcomings than by 
his consciousness of his own strength. And the 
one person against whose folly and enmity one 
needs most to guard is one's self. 

I have therefore my own cities of refuge, 
whither I flee to escape my implacable enemy — 
myself. For this eminently respectable me, that 
I dress up in as good clothes as I can buy and 
would have all people think to be sober, high- 

51 



LAME AND LOVELY 

minded, self-controlled, and good — yea, that I 
have even at times set up in pulpits and on plat- 
forms and made preach and lecture to honest folk, 
telling them what they ought to do, is a fellow I 
should hate to have you know too well. 

As there were three cities of refuge in Jewry, 
so I will give but three of mine, though there are 
others. 

First and foremost is work. I work not be- 
cause I like it, for I would rather spend money 
than earn it and I could loaf as thoroughly as the 
next man; nor because I need to make a living, 
for any one can knock off work and be a parasite ; 
some one will always look out for the lazy as well 
as for the sick; but because I am afraid not to 
work. 

In work I respect myself and am at peace with 
the infinite without me and within me. When at 
work I am Dr. Jekyll. I would not dare to start 
out merely to live a life of ease; I would be afraid 
of Mr. Hyde. Work is simply the salvation of 
the soul, not possibly in an evangelical sense but 
at least in common sense, because it saves me not 
from theological horrors I know nothing about, 
but from myself, which is a horror that " comes 
home to men's business and bosoms." 

52 



THE ESCAPE FROM SELF 

Crime in society is largely the product of lei- 
sure. Most of the ordinary moral lesions could 
be cured by sawing wood. 

The second city of refuge is called order. I 
find that if I do not compel myself to system and 
regular hours I get nothing done at all. If I 
worked only when I felt like it you could put it in 
your eye. The greatest humbug loose is inspira- 
tion. Perhaps this should be qualified thus : occa- 
sional inspiration is a humbug. 

For the divine afflatus is a stream that runs in, 
grooves, as indeed all emotions, to be strong and 
dependable, must be trained to come at certain 
hours. The heart has its habits. The world's 
best work, noblest poetry, and divinest prophecy 
have come through men who were pounding away 
so many hours a day. 

Of course, out-of-the-way hints and whispers 
come at odd moments to souls, and man is not a 
treadmill; but one who depends upon feeling like 
it to do his work soon ceases to feel like it, he is 
weakening his will power. 

By system you not only accomplish so much 
more but you get a peculiar poise and a blissful 
sort of contentment with yourself, the same sensa- 
tion you get from seeing a swept and tidy room. 

53 



LAME AND LOVELY 

An unordered day is like a cluttered desk or a 
frowzy woman. 

The third city of refuge is called wife* Any 
man would be ashamed to tell how many vile and 
blackguard thoughts have made at him only to be 
warded off by this heart wall ; how sometimes her 
presence and the touch of her hand give peace and 
avert a panic, as if an army with banners had 
moved to the succor of a beleaguered city. 

A good bachelor must be either a strong and 
noble man or a bloodless paste. Most of us are 
neither one nor the other; we are simply human, 
and a human man needs a wife as a locomotive 
needs an engineer, to prevent a wreck, as well as 
to make him go. 

These cities of refuge and these arts and ways 
of saving one's self from one's self may throw 
some light, perhaps, upon the reason why there is 
inserted into the Lord's Prayer the petition : 

11 Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us 
from evil ! " 



54 



THE LOVE OF WOMAN 

Amor sementa in noi d'ogni virtute. — Love im- 
plants within us every virtue. — Dante. 

U Amour est un feu auquel s'epurent les plus 
nobles sentiments. — Love is a fire by which are 
purified our noblest emotions. — Balzac. 

THE universal opinion of mankind places the 
love to God as the chief motive force in 
morals. 

Right next to this in importance and in power 
comes the supreme love of one man and one 
woman. 

It may have its roots in the desires of the body, 
as a lily has its roots in the mold, but its flower 
and spiritual consummation is farthest removed 
from earthliness and has the finest ethical flavor. 

It is amazing how many saints and councils and 
ecclesiastic polemics have regarded the love of 
woman in some way akin to evil. While religion- 
ists fulminated against the danger of soft smiles 
and laughing eyes to the soul, down in Provence 

55 



LAME AND LOVELY 

the troubadours were founding a better theology, 
which crept over the Alps and touched one Dante, 
who perhaps more than any other genius has 
rescued woman from the slough of sense and made 
her man's spiritual guide. The substance of his 
gospel was that it is woman whose soul awakens 
the soul of man to his kinship with God. 

Michelangelo, in his sonnet to Vittoria Colonna, 
expressed it : 

For O! how good that God must be 
Who made so good a thing as thee! 

The ancient Jews had their " court of women " 
in their temples, and the Mohammedans deny 
them souls ; so also the hermits and holy anchorites 
prayed to be delivered from them. 

If our civilization of to-day is better, and at 
least it is kinder and more humane; if we have 
penetrated into the core of all religion and found 
it to consist of no more nor less than emotional 
altruism (altruism with dynamic), the prime cause 
of our advantage is that women have assumed the 
spiritual leadership of the age. 

In our churches it is " the court of men " that 
fringes the rear of the meeting; with us, contrary 
to Islam, we sometimes doubt if men have souls. 

56 



THE LOVE OF WOMAN 

I say if a man has become so entangled with insti- 
tutional theology that he cannot tell whether or 
not he dare claim he loves God, let him love his 
wife. If that is not loving deity, it is the next 
thing to it. 

I speak soberly. I refer to ethical power. 
Sincere, loyal love between one man and one 
< woman is to my mind a hundred times purer than 
that purity supposed to bloom in the unmated. A 
good wife is a better cure for unworthy thoughts 
Vthan fasting and flagellation. 
j And equally good is a supreme exclusive affec- 
tion in the woman soul. To utterly love one man, 
I to choose him and cling to him " for better or for 
I worse," is not to be called conducive to religion: 
\ it must be called religi o n itself. 

This human love, romantic affection, which 

sin in the best way sin can be ousted, by what Chal- 
mers called " the expulsive force of a new emo- 
tion." It stops moral lesion by the most potent 
of moral antiseptics, love itself. It heals the 
diseases of the soul, not by the crude methods of 
bleeding and blistering, incantations and amulets, 
but by the rational scientific principle of " assisting 
nature to throw off the poison." 

57 



LAME AND LOVELY 

It goes to the seat of life and empowers there. 
It stimulates the white corpuscles of the spirit to 
devour and destroy all deadly microbes and dan- 
gerous bacilli. 

It is significant that all through the middle ages 
men worshiped a woman with a baby in her arms. 
It is still significant that the most vigorous reli- 
gious movement in this opening of the Twentieth 
Century is headed by a woman. 

The dying Bunsen said to his wife, as she 
stooped to kiss him : " In thy face have I seen 
the eternal! " 



58 



THE MOTHER OF EVIL 

The Mother of Evil is not Joy, but the Lack of 
Joy. — Friedrich Nietzsche. 

/ am come that your joy may be full. — Jesus. 

BY a curious twist in the morbid nature of man 
the sunny gospel of Jesus Christ has often 
been construed into a shadow of gloom. 

No one had a firmer hold on life, a sounder 
taste of its pleasure, a richer appreciation of the 
higher possibilities for joy concealed in existence 
than Jesus. 

Unfortunately, he was an oriental, and by 
some strange will of destiny his cult first spread 
among occidentals. All his picturesque imagery, 
his poetry, his delicate, piercing shafts of intui- 
tional perception, were hardened into doctrines 
and syllogisms, and his social truth, intended to 
permeate " like a lump of leaven," became a rigid 
organization. 

We may have gained something — who shall 
say? — but we certainly have lost much. When 

59 



LAME AND LOVELY 

you pluck your lily to pieces, scatter its odorous 
petals on the ground, and transect with a sharp 
knife its swelling seed-sac, you may have added to 
your knowledge of systematic botany, but you have 
lost your lily ; its grace, color, fragrance, and fruit- 
fulness — and the flower was created for those* 

And we may be sure there was some charm of 
life, some fullness of deep joy, that played like a 
felt radiance about his eyes and smile, that so 
drew to him the " multitudes," for the common 
people follow only what smacks of life. Most 
of all does our age lack in the realization of his 
warm humanity. 

He came, he said, that our joy might be full. 
There is the cure of sin. It remained for 
Nietzsche, the declared enemy of our faith, to see 
it most clearly. " It is not joy, but the lack of 
joy, that is the mother of evil." 

There never was a mortal sin that did not 
spring from an empty heart. What are all 
blasphemies but brutish, twisted prayers for 
inward peace? What are drunkenness and all 
fleshly naughtiness but the struggling of souls to 
fill themselves at the swine's trough of sensuality? 
What are cruelties and injustice and oppression 
but the attempt to stay the appetite for joy with 

60 



THE MOTHER OF EVIL 

poison and bitter passions ? And, taking the whole 
range of human wickedness, murder, envy, hate, 
lust, theft, unkindness, and money-madness, do 
they not seem to be the cries and grimaces and 
wild gestures of starving gods locked out of the 
banquet hall of truth, beating with bruised hands 
against the door ? 

Whoever, therefore, plants one pure pleasure in 
the garden of men, and teaches us how to eat 
thereof and not sicken, has helped to stay the open 
wound of human sin. We are beginning, these 
last days, to perceive that the way to make the 
world as good as possible is to make it as happy 
as possible, and not as miserable as possible. 

Economists are commencing to understand that 
what makes slums is dark, wretched lives; what 
makes drunkenness and the social evil is emptiness. 

Our new gospel is unconsciously the old one and 
the true one. We are trying to make the people's 
joy full, to save the people from vice and death. 
So in Jesus' name we may not be building lofty 
cathedrals, as they did in another age, but we are 
laying out parks, setting apart playgrounds for 
children, rearing a mighty public school system to 
shatter ignorance, promoting science to woo the 
truth, building hospitals for the sick, and asylums 

61 



LAME AND LOVELY 

for the insane, and blind, and deaf and dumb, and 
feeble minded, transforming prison hells into sane 
reformatories. 

We are extending art and learning and music 
and the drama and all civilizing pleasures more 
and more toward the common man, establishing 
libraries and making the best literature cheap and 
popular — all in the name of the Son of Man, to 
shunt the vast river of human joy that for cen- 
turies ran only into the pools of the elect, into the 
broad lowlands of the people. 

To this end all philanthropists, labor unions, 
socialist movements, democracies, scientists, and 
schools, march along different roads. 

Law, repression, punishment, didactic warnings, 
and prohibitions, these do not cure crime ; they do 
but " heal the hurt of the daughter of my people 
slightly, crying, peace, peace, when there is no 
peace." Whoever will cure us, let him " come 
that our joy may be full." 



62 



MONEY 

Quel bien lui en revient-il? — What good does 
he get of it? — Bossuet. 

SINCE the dawn of preaching we preachers 
have been threatening^rich men with our right 
fist — and extending to them our left palm. It is 
hardly to be wondered at that we find difficulty in 
being taken seriously. 

And our advice has been so confusing that we 
have not had much effect. For now we exhort 
the youth to all the virtues, giving as an induce- 
ment the assurance that thus they will be enabled 
to get on; and again we turn to those that have 
gotten on and warn them of the danger of riches. 
It might well be asked, if riches be dangerous, why 
acquire them; and if virtues lead to riches, are they 
really worth cultivating? 

It may be well, therefore, to set down a few 
common-sense facts in regard to riches and the re- 
lation of them to the moral values. 

In the first place, money is simply the token or 

63 



LAME AND LOVELY 

sign of our common human wants. It means 
power, power over others, power to make our per- 
sonality felt. No wonder we want it. 

Again it means liberty. Poverty is a curse. It 
ties the hands. It binds the mind. It narrows 
the soul. One who has to sweat ten hours a day 
for bread has no time nor strength left to develop 
the higher part of himself. 

Money means also a full life. We can gratify 
our cravings, whether they be for beer or art, for 
Paris gowns or Wagner music. With money we 
have a chance to grow; without it we are stunted. 

Money, therefore, is simply concentrated — we 
might say canned — human value. 

It naturally follows that it is good or bad, never 
of itself, but only as giving opportunity to its pos- 
sessor. Here, then, we have the moral gist of the 
whole matter : money is simply — opportunity. 

It unlocks the door and bids the cramped and 
chafing passion go and do its will. It liberates de- 
sire. Hence it simply emphasizes a man. If he 
is good he can now be better, having more scope; 
if bad he can, and probably will, be worse. If idle 
and useless, he becomes a living fountain of idle- 
ness and uselessness, poisoning others. 

So, money is like any other gift; a9 beauty, 

64 



MONEY 

which adds power to the person; or genius, which 
multiplies the efficiency of the mind and hand; or 
position, for kingship magnifies a common man to 
heroic proportions, in his influence on other men. 

Now, the sole relation of morals to power of 
any kind is this: that the moral sense adds to 
power — responsibility. 

The root of any genuine moral feeling is al- 
truism. Given any desire, it becomes moral as it 
takes a direction toward the welfare of other peo- 
ple: it is immoral exactly in proportion as it dis- 
regards others and looks only to self. 

Wicked people, therefore, are those who live, 
think, and do for self alone ; and that whether poor 
or rich. Whoever says, " I would like to be rich, 
for I could do so much good with my money," 
should examine himself and ask what good he is 
doing with the little he has. It is all a matter of 
relation. If one is not helpful and liberal on $40 
a month, he would not be so on $4,000 a month. 

In the ultimate realm of morals there are no 
commandments ; there is only one test — do I live 
for myself or for others ; am I altruistic or egocen- 
tric? 

The dawdling smart set, flitting from bridge to 
matinee, from theater to bedizened restaurant, 

65 



LAME AND LOVELY 

from the club to the horse race, are wicked ; but no 
wickeder than the bitter poor who want to lead 
such a life, and who curse their lot because their 
selfishness is bound and chained. 

To the real man, therefore, riches means noth- 
ing at all, as to his character; it simply means an 
opening to give vent to his character. And a 
clear-eyed soul, that sees and realizes what re- 
sponsibility means, is never eager for power and 
opportunity. It is easier to be good in moderate 
means than in riches for the principal reason that 
it is easier to bear a small than a great load of 
responsibility. " It is hard for a rich man to enter 
the kingdom of heaven," just because a rich man 
to be moral must be great. And, unfortunately, 
great souls are scarce among great fortunes. 

The greatness of Jesus was not in his wisdom, 
magnetism, nor ethical perception, but in the fact 
that he was utterly altruistic; that is, he used all 
his powers not to advance himself but to help 
others. His tormentors unwittingly told the truth, 
and stated unknowingly his very secret, when, as 
he hung on the cross, they wagged their heads at 
him and cried : 

" He saved others; himself he cannot save ! " 



66 



POINTS OF SOCIAL DECAY 

You are the salt of the earth. Put yourselves 
at the decaying points of social life and stop the 
putrefaction. — Maltbie Babcock. 

EVERY man that has in him the health of 
sound principles, owes a duty to the mass of 
men of which he is a part. 

All genuine conviction is militant. A sincere 
belief always wants to " go out and compel them 
to come in." It is essential to any honest faith 
that it desires to draw all others to it. 

Truth is at heart intolerant; knowing itself, 
with a fierce certainty, to be unspeakably better 
than error. 

In most things we know ourselves ignorant, 
children facing mysteries; so in most things we 
should be tolerant and liberal. But in the few 
things that we know through and through it be- 
hooves us to be hard as nails. On a question of the 
trinity or the miracles let us argue calmly — and 
endlessly; but on a question of decency versus 

6 7 



LAME AND LOVELY 

indecency, or cruelty versus kindness, it is a word 
and a blow. 

Hence, it is for every modern soul, who feels 
the strong truths of civilization coursing through 
his thought, to stand for them, against all comers. 
He who has the truth is salt. Error is putrefac- 
tion. Where wrong prevails in the social organ- 
ism, let the man of salt thrust himself, as his duty 
to the universe. 

Certain main points of decay may be mentioned; 
certain places where error is flagrant, fragrant, 
and stifling. First, it is the duty of every child 
of light to shine out against the ancient world 
fraud and inherited curse of militarism. Where- 
ever the harpy — head of war — lust shows itself 
he ought to take a shot at it. 

For war is the most monstrous putrefying 
agency on earth to-day, and that includes all mil- 
itary preparedness. Whoever believes in truth 
and justice should do what he can, in his small cor- 
ner, to bring about the parliament of man, the 
federation of the world. 

Again, every man of salt and health should do 
his utmost to break down caste wherever he finds 
it. Whatever system or organization or custom 
impedes the free rise and scope of the individual 

68 



POINTS OF SOCIAL DECAY 

is a rotting point. All select classes, aristocracies, 
plutocracies, bureaucracies, and whatever schemes 
there may be for controlling the people or the 
wealth or labor of the people by a set of persons 
who are chosen by any other than the people, and 
who are not directly responsible to the people, are 
germ centers of tyranny, and eventually always of 
injustice and cruelty. 

All that devious thing we call graft is also a 
breeding spot of social disease. In whatever 
mask it appears, however polished, honored, and 
disguised, wherever one sees the fatal symptom of 
public office for personal gain he ought to de- 
nounce and oppose it. It may lurk in intricate 
tariffs, or sit smug in wigged courts, or blow like a 
sperm whale in dignified senates, or pervade as an 
invisible spirit the circles of business; but no mat- 
ter where, how, or why it is, it is rotten. 

In the nearer affairs of life we may safely lay 
down the rule that whatever threatens the integ- 
rity and happiness of the home life, where one 
man, one woman, and their children are gathered 
in the family, the oldest and best institution on 
earth, is foul. Whatever makes a good woman 
blush is septic. Whatever tends to make little 
children unhappy is poison. Whatever gospel 

6 9 



LAME AND LOVELY 

takes the nerve out of men and discourages them, 
in its general effect is unjustifiable and depraved. 
Also, whatever or whoever loves and clings to a 
lie, to anything that he knows to be untrue, is 
pregnant with trouble and obliquity. 

The only healthful, pure, sound, stanch self- 
cleaning, and exceedingly good and green growing 
thing under heaven or in heaven, among men or 
among angels, is — the truth. 



70 



REDEMPTION BY SELF-RESPECT 

// is hard for a man to respect himself when 
he is denied respect by all around him. — W. E. 
Channing. 

THE foundation of character is self-respect 
The citadel of virtue is a proper pride. 

Out of self-contempt flow bitterness, suspicion, 
yielding to sensualities, and the acceptance of low 
standards. Self-respect is not egotism, but resem- 
bles it about as a good apple resembles a decayed 
one. Self-respect is sound, sweet, and healthy. 
Egotism is morbid and sore to the touch. Self- 
respect is tough ; egotism is tender. 

Call a child low, and bad, and lazy and you 
make him so. All accusation, and scolding, and 
punishment is unpedagogic. It never did any 
good. To punish a child by beating simply proves 
to him one thing, to-wit: that you are a bigger 
brute than he. The whole business of breaking 
the will, taking down the pride, humiliating and 
subduing people, is utterly immoral, and that 
whether applied to children or to grown people. 

71 



LAME AND LOVELY 

No human being was ever morally helped in his 
weakness or morally cured of his perversion by 
any other means save one — that is, by apprecia- 
tion. It is that which reaches down into the soul 
and raises the prostrate will ; that and nothing else. 

Love is the only creative, healing force. Hate 
and all the arts and actions of hate are vicious. 
Anger and condemnation are devastating always. 
Hence our whole prison system is ignorant and the 
most fruitful manufactory of criminals we have. 
Prisons are holdovers from the dark ages. They 
are vile, stupid, and poison fountains in society. 
Any warden of the penitentiary will tell you con- 
victs are not reformed in his institution; they are 
punished. 

That means their self-respect is broken down 
by all the ingenuity of devilishness society will al- 
low, and the self-despising wrecks are turned loose 
again on the people. Any system of justice that 
starts from the principle that a criminal is to 
be punished is unscientific, unintelligent, and im- 
moral. Punishment simply means vengeance. 

To send a criminal to the horror of the peniten- 
tiary is of the same grade as kicking a horse in the 
stomach because he shies or balks. 

A criminal is such usually because he has lost his 
72 



REDEMPTION BY SELF-RESPECT 

self-respect. And the prison ought to be a place 
where he can regain it. It ought to be a school 
for weak wills, a training house where human na- 
ture could learn a little dignity. It is refreshing 
to note that attempts are being made in this direc- 
tion in some states with most encouraging results. 

The worst blot on our civilization is that we 
have made so little progress in the cure of the 
socially unsound. Our theology is practically past 
condemning souls to eternal punishment; but our 
actual sociological practice can still find no use to 
make of a depraved man but to vent our hate on 
him by sending him for from one year to a life- 
time to a hell on earth. Society still has got no 
further along than to strike back when it is struck. 
But it ought to be the glory of organized justice 
to be free from this bestial heat for revenge and 
to do with the lawbreaker precisely what is for the 
best interests of the community at large. And 
those interests never demand that he be taken and 
hardened into a professional pervert, but that he 
be healed and set right. 

That we do not know how to do this is igno- 
rance and pardonable; but that we don't try nor 
want to know how is disgraceful and unpardon- 
able. 

73 



LAME AND LOVELY 

Jesus was right. Tolstoi was right. They 
were not crazy nor Utopian. They were in line 
with sound common sense and with the known 
truths of psychology. God help us! We apply 
modern science to transportation, and cooking, and 
lighting, and to all forms of business and comfort, 
but not to the cure of fallen self-respect, exactly 
where it needs most to be applied. 

We have left off flogging children and have be- 
gun to study them. Let us leave off brutalizing 
and stunting men and women and begin to study 
how to help them. 



74 



THE SIMPLICITY OF MASTERS 

La philosophic nest que le retour conscient et 
reflechi aux donnees de Vintuition. — M. Berg- 
SON. 

THIS sentence of M. Bergson, professor in the 
College de France and one of the most ad- 
vanced and thorough of modern philosophers, has 
been called by Edouard Schure " simple, conclu- 
sive, and immense, containing the whole future,' 5 
and may be freely translated : " Philosophy is 
only the discovery by the conscious, reflective mind 
of what we already know by intuition." 

Here, then, is the circle of wisdom, the return 
of truth upon itself; for all the deep, vast, eternal 
laws of life are woven into the very texture of the 
soul, and the old man, after years of search and 
wandering, comes back to the little child. Emer- 
son said that " when God has a point to carry with 
the race he plants his arguments in the instincts," 
and Jesus' exclamation was to the same effect: 
44 1 thank thee, O Father, that Thou hast hidden 

75 



LAME AND LOVELY 

these things from the wise and prudent, and hast 
revealed them unto babes I " 

It is only among the partly wise that we are fed 
with involved and profound sayings; when we 
reach the masters, Epictetus or Socrates or Jesus, 
they talk to us in the language of the street and 
their sentences are homespun and childlike. 

The fakirs are complex. Those who know but 
little and would seem to know much are mysteri- 
ous. The masters baffle us by their plainness. 
The lights are turned low in the fortune teller's 
booth; Jesus taught on the hillside in the sun. 
The road to wisdom leads through and beyond all 
night shades of dim temples and sacred woods, 
into the dawn. The real truth is clear as the 
morning. 

We shall come to poise and peace, therefore, as 
we learn to perceive and to follow the few great 
intuitions, and these we find best in children. In- 
stead of trying to teach children, that is, drilling 
into them our stupid conventionalities and cow- 
ardly moral compromises, we ought to let 
them teach us; we should sit at their feet and 
observe their unconscious revelation of God's 
secrets. 

Properly studied, children will teach us the 

7 6 



THE SIMPLICITY OF MASTERS 

three great arts of life — the art of joy, the art 
of faith, and the art of reverence. 

From them we may learn, if we be humble 
minded and teachable, the art of joy, which con- 
sists in living like birds and flowers. The child 
is not afraid to be happy; he throws himself head 
first into what pleasure he finds, which is plainly 
the purpose of nature. 

It is the philosophy and religion of grown-ups 
that set so much value upon misery. Of course, 
we can twist this truth into an excuse for sin and 
folly; the purer and truer the law of God the more 
dangerous it is in the hands of ignorance and per- 
version. 

From children we learn the art of faith, which 
is merely the conviction that the universe and its 
forces are friendly. The child instinctively be- 
lieves that all people are well disposed toward 
him ; he has to be taught the adult facts of hatred 
and enmity and malice. The whole progress of 
the race is through fear and wars and distrust unto 
the millennium, which is confidence in the universal 
friendliness of men. 

Through dark theologies and harsh political 
theories we are working our way to the ultimate 
child truth that to believe in one another and not 

77 



LAME AND LOVELY 

to be afraid of neighbors or antipodes, and not 
even of the spirits of the air nor of the Great Spirit 
himself, is the ultimate solution of the problems 
both of government and of religion. 

And we learn from children the art of rever- 
ence. That feeling of awe and wonder, inborn 
in the normal child, is the one secret of greatness 
in grown persons if they can retain it. From this 
emotion comes all poetry, all majesty of spirit, all 
grandeur of character. It is likewise the subtle 
cause of all morality, as well as of all the courtesies 
and decencies of life. 

Can we wonder that Jesus, when the disciples 
were disputing among themselves who should be 
the greatest among them, took a little child and 
when he had set him in their midst said that, " Ex- 
cept ye be converted and become as little children 
ye shall not see the kingdom of God." 

For the important affair is not getting into the 
kingdom, but seeing it, knowing what it is, realiz- 
ing and recognizing it. And we see the kingdom 
in proportion as we " discover by the conscious 
and reflective mind what we already know by in- 
tuition." 



78 



THE RESERVES 

Si succiderit, de genu pugnat. — // he stumbles, 
he fights on his knees. (Motto for Will Moore 9 s 
tombstone.) 

We have only to set the one annoying circum- 
stance over against our whole relation to life to dis- 
cover its insignificant proportions. — J. Brierly. 

IN Mrs. Burnett's charming play, " The Dawn 
of a To-morrow," a millionaire, disgusted 
with life and bent on suicide, wandering through 
a slum district of London, meets a street waif, a 
girl named Glad, who perceives his intent and 
turns him from it by her naive philosophy, not 
knowing him to be a " swell " and thinking him 
but one of the underworld like herself, she advises 
him to " think of something else," whenever the 
suicidal obsession grips him. 

"The Gospel of Something Else," as we may 
term it, is amazingly practical and fruitful in im- 
mediate, definite good results. There is always 
something else. The one distressing thing that 

79 



LAME AND LOVELY 

threatens us may be dodged, not always literally, 
but always spiritually. We can get a man's body 
into a corner, but the mind cannot be cornered. 

The most effectual resources are those within 
the soul. The great soul is the one with uncon- 
querable resources. The thing that strikes us in 
Socrates is that Athenian spite, prison, and hem- 
lock somehow do not touch the man, he is smiling 
within him superior to his enemies all the time. 
The Bhagavad Ghita speaks of those " inner 
treasures of the mind, on which depending one 
is not moved by the severest pain." Amiel says, 
" Rentrer dans l'ordre, se soumettre, et faire ce 
qu'on peut." [Get into step with the universe 
and do what you can.] Even death, that seems 
final to most men, is despised when it approaches 
Nathan Hale, for he brings to his rescue the over- 
powering odds of patriotism and is happy, regret- 
ting only that he has but one life to give for his 
country. We hear no shrieks and panic fears 
from General Wolfe as he dies before Quebec; as 
they assure him that the enemy flees he cries, 
" Then I die happy." 

The moral grandeur of Jesus appears in this 
connection. Truly he has " meat to eat that his 
disciples know not of." He sets this small life 

80 



THE RESERVES 

over against eternity: " Rejoice when men perse- 
cute you, for great is your reward in heaven." 

He escapes the harassment of the petty by 
refuge in the vast: " Take no thought what ye 
shall eat and drink : seek first the kingdom of God 
and his righteousness, and all these things shall be 
added to you." He even submerged death with 
the flood of his inward glory, for he " endured 
the cross, despising the shame, for the joy that was 
set before him." 

How much more effective we should be, how 
much steadier our hand, and accurate our judg- 
ment, if we would learn this secret! The most 
important thing in the world to me is the weather 
in my soul. Let it be sunshine there and calm 
day and the odor of hidden flowers and I can front 
anything. No matter how terrible the trial to 
come, I have half won already if I can meet it 
serenely. And no matter what prize and joy may 
be given me, I have half spoiled it if I take it with 
a troubled and muddy soul. 

Let us set down then in our books that we are 
absolutely unconquerable. Nothing shall break 
us. For it is only the one special thing that is my 
enemy: the universe is my friend. 

While I have eyes, no one ugly thing shall dis- 
81 



LAME AND LOVELY 

tress me, for the earth and sky are crowded with 
beauty; while I have ears, no single sound shall 
irritate me, for the world harmonies cease not, 
and: 

There's not a star that thou beholdest 
But in his motion like an angel sings, 
Still quiring to the young eyed cherubim. 

While I have a heart no treachery nor coldness 
on the part of any one I love shall utterly cast me 
down, for there is true love somewhere, and for 
me, and if I find it not on this planet, still my 
world is wider and none can rob me of the hope of 
some day meeting again those I have loved long 
since and lost awhile. 

Our little earth is clasped by the majestic sky, 
our small planet is surrounded by an innumerable 
company of worlds, my insignificant body is one of 
a billion similar bodies now extant, my whole self 
and all my concerns are as a drop of rain falling 
into the Atlantic. 

I take refuge in the infinite. O mine enemy, 
you cannot find me ! I have hidden in the infinite. 
In peace I sing the words of Mrs. Browning: 

And I smiled to think God's goodness 
Flowed around our incompleteness, 
Round our restlessness His rest. 
82 



FERMENTING THOUGHTS 

O, that way madness lies; let me shun that! 

— King Lear. 

The Greeks were right when they made Apollo 
the god of both imagination and sanity; for he was 
both the patron of poetry and the patron of heal- 
ing. — G. K. Chesterton. 

HAVE you ever noticed how thoughts feel in- 
side your mind? Some are satisfying as 
bread, some fiery as pepper, some refreshing as 
water, some heady as wine, and some — and these 
are they I am going to treat of — lie in the mind's 
stomach heavy as lead, painful, nauseating, and 
making one sick of life. 

These last are thoughts that ferment and do not 
digest. I once ate a ham sandwich at a railway 
lunch counter. I found no relief until the physi- 
cians had made use of a stomach pump, and I did 
not recover from the effects for a month. There 
are certain thoughts that act precisely the same 

83 



LAME AND LOVELY 

way within the brain; they cause " mental gas- 
tritis." 

In the mind's cellar everything must be kept 
sweet and clean, if we do not want to breed spirit- 
ual fevers. As soon as an idea begins to " work " 
and spoil and sour, out with it ! It does not pay 
to go about this bright world with something 
yeasting and seething in our souls. 

It is the very best of foods that spoil the most 
quickly, such as cream, beefsteak, and butter. 
The cream, beefsteak, and butter of the soul are 
love, religion, and laughter. 

So it is these things we must watch most care- 
fully. Love, the very milk of life, is worth all 
that poets have written and fond and foolish heads 
have dreamed of it. But if love thoughts are go- 
ing to " keep " and not play havoc within us, we 
must air our hearts often and keep them clean and 
be on the watch for the insistent microbe that 
dearly loves to multiply in a love " culture." 

Love made Dante divine, but of Othello it 
made a crazy fool. Cared for intelligently and 
kept clean, love will give you a heavenly peace 
and glow — there's nothing like it; but if it be- 
comes unclean and begins to spoil, you will know 
what eternal punishment is. Whether, therefore, 

84 



FERMENTING THOUGHTS 

love shall be a radiant shekinah or a driving ruin 
in the brain is largely a sanitary question. 

Laughter is good. It may not save our souls, 
but it often saves our lives. It prevents insanity. 
But it is like butter. It must be fresh; likewise 
clean; also spread not too thickly over the bread 
of serious business. 

No one can eat solid butter, unless he be an 
Eskimo; and no one, outside a madhouse, can 
laugh all the time. Some of the saddest people I 
have known have been those whose only business 
was to find something to amuse them. 

And religion. This is man's greatest passion 
and privilege; hence, also his greatest danger. 
Sometimes it is a blessing, and sometimes it seems 
quite the opposite. It will inspire a Francis of 
Assisi to amaze the world with his love, a William 
Booth to lead an altruistic army into the slums, and 
a Father Damien to consecrate his life to the lep- 
ers; and it will strengthen men's moral sinews, 
cheer their hearts, brighten their faces, and cause 
them to be a sun ray to their fellows and to tri- 
umph over death. 

And again, sad to say, it seems to make others 
morose and dark-souled, narrow and bigoted, con- 
tentious, and even cruel. As was said of liberty, 

85 



LAME AND LOVELY 

, so it may be said of religion, " What crimes have 
been committed in thy name ! " 

Whatever may be your faith — and every man, 
even so-called infidels, have a belief of some kind 
— I wish to make one suggestion : Keep it sweet ! 
Rest assured that if your belief makes you crabbed 
and pugnacious, or critical, or morose, then it is 
bad. No matter what your creed is it ought to 
bring forth the one flower that makes any creed 
worth while, and that is amiability. 

Clean up or cast out every fermenting thought, 
whether uncleanliness or distrust, the memory of 
a wrong or the apprehension of disaster. Feed 
your mind on clean, sweet, wholesome thoughts. 
Above all, do not indulge in self-pity, most horri- 
ble of all mental toadstools ! 

" Keep thy heart," said the wise man, " with all 
diligence, for out of it are the issues of life I " 



86 



RELIGIOUS VALUE OF A SENSE OF 
HUMOR 

Humor has all along been the candid friend of 
religion. It has done more to hasten the disintegra- 
tion of narrow religious conventions than all the 
German commentators together. Humor is a re- 
ligious force in that it discounts fictitious values and 
minimizes the -petty rivalries of existence. 

— Richard Le Gallienne. 

"T T 7HO can reply to a sneer? " asked a the- 
VV ologian. The answer is plain; who- 
ever cannot resist a sneer had better look to his 
position. For the most searching, merciless, and 
effective thing in the world is humor. 

11 The tragic poet rolls the thunder that fright- 
ens," says Landor; " the comic wields the lightning 
that kills." 

There seems to be something in laughter that 
is directly opposed to the reverence and awe of re- 
ligion. But for that reason wit has all along been 
for piety a most necessary, if bitter, physic. 

87 



LAME AND LOVELY 

The higher moods of the soul have always a 
tendency to grow unhealthy. It is but a step from 
the sweet ripe to rotten; and spiritual ecstasy has 
more than once, in the world's sad history, run 
into refined sensuousness, also into the worst of 
tyrannies and cruelties. And what an argument 
or a scripture text could never reach has been trans- 
fixed by a smile. The walls of many a spiritual 
Jericho-folly that have withstood laws, arms, and 
reasons, have tumbled at the sound of laughter. 

But the best quality in humor, for individual 
use by the saint, is its inherent sanity. People deep 
in love do not laugh much because they are quite 
crazy. Egoism, in its overdevelopment, when it 
becomes a besetting sense of dignity, when it makes 
one feel he is a great and misunderstood man, 
laughs little, because that also is a form of insanity. 
The religious bigot is most monstrously serious, 
for the same reason. 

When we say a sense of humor has religious 
value we do not imply that it is a divine or heav- 
enly thing, for it is not. But it is something fully 
as necessary; it is most human. And what re- 
ligion needs as much as heavenliness is humanness. 

When one looks abroad in this comfortable 
world and sees the infinite amount of play and un- 



SENSE OF HUMOR 

mixed fun which its Creator has written into it 
he can hardly resist the logical conclusion that God • 
is not so utterly sober as we have been led to be- 
lieve. "Who," asks Dr. Holmes, "taught the 
kitten to play with its tail, and the canary to perk 
its head from side to side while singing? " It can 
hardly be irreverent to conceive of Him who 
planted such capering instincts in all young things, 
in romping poodles and leaping lambs, in birds and 
insects and children; it cannot be a sin to think 
of Him who ordered this, and made the blithe 
morning and all morning feelings, as being jocund, 
and having somewhere in His mighty mind a strain 
of mirth. 

Humor, of course, is not always right. Every- 
thing human has its perversions. There is a dev- 
il's glee, there is the snicker of the gross and fleshy, 
and there is that goatlike inanity that would caper 
on its mother's grave to raise a grin. But let 
such things have their day. Our deepest rever- 
ences do not hear them, our real purity cannot see 
them. 

The humor of a kindly heart, the friendly wit 
that is the bubbling over of a full humanity, the 
surgical smile that lances our too sickly sentiments, 
the sunny laugh that with its genial broadness re- 

8 9 



LAME AND LOVELY 

bukes our narrow thought, the disinfectant raillery 
that purges our egotisms, these are all friends of 
man and true him to life and destiny. 

If it be, as Carlyle says, that in the center of 
worship is sorrow, it is no less true that all about its 
edges is a fringe of humor. 

He is our friend who makes us weep for our 
sins, and he is not our enemy who makes our fol- 
lies ridiculous. 



90 



THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOOD 
AND BAD 

Hast thou reflected, O serious reader, Advanced 
Liberal or other, that the one end, essence, and use 
of all religion, past, present, and to come, is to re- 
mind us of this only, of the quite infinite difference 
between a good man and a bad? — Thomas Car- 

LYLE. 

WITH microscopic vision, Carlyle has here 
seen the rock bottom on which rest not 
only all religion, but all ethics, morals, and de- 
cencies. 

The thoroughly bad man is not the one who, 
like Lucifer says, " Evil, be thou my good! " He 
is the one who denies the distinction. Goethe's 
Mephistopheles was a better Bad Man than Mil- 
ton's Lucifer; for Milton's hero of darkness sulked 
and raged and rebelled; Goethe's smiled. The 
highest impiety is not a blasphemy; it is a smile. 

The wickedest people are not they who cele- 
brate the black mass and dance in witches' sab- 

91 



LAME AND LOVELY 

baths, are not the Ingersolls speech-making against 
theology, nor the Nietzsches couching a lance 
against morality itself; all these are as orthodox 
as the narrowest saints. In fact, when a man sets 
out to demolish Christianity he really joins the most 
absurd corruption of it he can find, by assuming 
that the peculiar distorted sect he selects is true 
Christianity. Hence all the so-called militant " in- 
fidels " are really the friends of our faith, since 
they help to purge it of its diseases. 

But our real foe is Gallio, who " cares for none 
of these things." Morality and immorality do 
not concern him. He will not discuss the place 
for the line between good and evil. He has 
rubbed out the line. 

The rebel and the king's troops both believe in 
the same flag; one is for and the other against 
it. So the deserter and the good soldier both 
have the same standard, which one runs from and 
the other toward. But it is the same flag. 

Even so, the thieves and drunkards and wicked 
women, and all the soiled and vagabond crew we 
are wont to look upon as the opponents of the 
good and pious, are not they with whom religion's 
danger lies. In fact, they are not far from the 
kingdom. Did not Jesus say that the slum peo- 

92 



GOOD AND BAD 

pies would enter into the kingdom before the Phar- 
isees ? 

The actual danger to religion is found among 
the so-called " emancipated." Those who hold 
that white is the same as black if you have the 
right point of view, those to whom nothing mat- 
ters, those who have made of science a means to 
rob the soul of its power to blush, and have re- 
duced conscience and its motions to atavism and 
molecular gyrations, these are " our friends, the 
enemy." A shallow wading in science is likely to 
bring on such a moral anemia. 

Bacon tells us that a little knowledge bends men 
to atheism, but deeper goings bring them about to 
religion. And Tennyson warns his too sciolistic 
age: 

Hold thou the Good, define it well 
For fear divine philosophy 
Should go beyond the mark and be 
Procuress to the lords of hell. 

If there is any one thing that the wisdom of 
all humanity, east and west, has beaten out of 
the mixture and confusion of human hearts and 
events, if there is any one pure, golden truth upon 
which a man may leave his life and risk his destiny, 

93 



LAME AND LOVELY 

it is that the word " Ought " has a meaning, that 
in the sense of right and wrong is hidden the fun- 
damental truth about God and the hereafter. 

Out of all the whirl of arguing sects, the specu- 
lation of philosophers, the doctrines and counter 
doctrines of divines, this one solid and wholly un- 
shakable bit of rock emerges as the one fit thing a 
soul can afford to build his house upon, to-wit : that 
right is right and to live by and to die for, and 
wrong is wrong and to be hated and fought with 
all one's mortal might. 

That is religion ; the rest is trimmings. 



94 



CHILDLIKENESS AND CHILDISHNESS 

When I was a child I spoke, acted, and thought 
as a child, but when I became a man I put away 
childish things. — Saint Paul. 

Verily I say unto you, except ye be changed, and 
become as little children, ye shall not enter into 
the kingdom of heaven. Little children, of such 
is the kingdom of heaven. — Jesus. 

An ancient proverb warns us that we should not 
expect to find old heads on young shoulders; to 
which it may be added that we seldom meet with 
that unnatural combination but we feel a strong 
desire to knock them of; merely from an inherent 
love we have of seeing things in their right place. 

— Chx^rles Dickens. 

I ONCE had a silly book, compiled by some 
rabid bibliophobiac, and entitled " The Con- 
tradictions of the Bible, " in which were arranged 
in parallel columns those texts which seemed to 
contradict each other, each sentence being set op- 

95 



LAME AND LOVELY 

posite its negative. The whole work was based 
upon the error that a contradiction is equivalent 
to a lie. The truth, however, is quite the contrary. 
Contradictions are the favorite method of wise 
teachers; they are numerous in Socrates and in 
Bacon. 

Emerson said that " consistency is the hobgoblin 
of little minds, adored by little statesmen, and 
philosophers, and divines." And I have known 
but two classes of people who were absolutely con- 
sistent — idiots and dead men. 

The fact is that when you find a contradiction 
in a wise man or in a wise book, you will usually 
find midway between the two clashing statements 
one of the choicest morsels of truth, and one which 
could not have been expressed half so well in any 
other way. For often when a truth cannot be 
directly come at by a positive declaration, it can be, 
as it were, pointed at by two counteracting asser- 
tions. 

In the quotation above, the apostle indicates 
that when one grows up he should cease to be like 
a child; while the Master declares that except we 
turn and become like a child we are lost. And the 
confusion of this is but seeming, for it may be 
loosed and made into common sense by two words 

9 6 



CHILDLIKENESS AND CHILDISHNESS 

that are in our mouths every day — to-wit : the 
words childlike and childish. 

To be childlike, says Jesus, is to be great I 
have seen some great men in my time, and have 
tried to learn something of their secret; and I have 
never known one who was not simple, approach- 
able, and with a child heart. Great speech is 
always plain, lucid, and direct. Great art is least 
ornate. Great emotions are downright. Where- 
as pettiness of all kinds is sophisticated, smart, 
adorned, perfumed, and jeweled, or wants to be. 

Childishness is another matter. About nine- 
tenths of what we call sin is mere childishness, 
undeveloped morality, arrested ethical growth, a 
persistent child longing for gingerbread and gew- 
gaws, an inability to appreciate the future, and a 
readiness to sacrifice the future always for the 
present. 

Note some of the childish things which we are 
to put away. First of all is crying, the most char- 
acteristic of all child faults. Analyzed carefully, 
crying is found to consist in this: the gaining of 
what we desire by the use of our disagreeableness. 
It is the weapon of weakness. In adults we call 
it complaining, or pouting, or sulking. How 
many a woman gets her way by " the tyranny of 

97 



LAME AND LOVELY 

tears " ! And how many a man rules his house by 
sheer surliness ! Such are but grown up " bawl 
babies." It is almost worse than wickedness; it is 
meanness, and utterly despicable. Pardonable in 
a child of six, it is unpardonable in a big, 
bewhiskered hulk of forty-six. 

Another trait of childishness is the desire to 
" show off." Vanity, and love of notice, and the 
hunger for admiration is cunning enough in little 
Mable in short dresses and baby curls, but when 
Mable becomes Mrs. Q. K. Philander Jones, age 
thirty-five, and is president of the Ladies' Aid, and 
the mother of four children, and the wife of the 
leading grocer, it becomes her mightily to " put 
away childish things," and especially the desire to 
preen and prance, and occupy the spotlight. Mod- 
esty and a modicum of humility ought to come with 
maturity. 

A child, too, is naturally egoistic in his instincts. 
Every child seems to be a born predestinarian. I 
have had children at my own table, and I know 
that each seemed to believe, as his inborn creed, 
that he alone was predestined from the foundation 
of the world to have the largest piece of pie and 
the choicest portion of chicken. When we grow 
up this egocentric trait also is to be put away. A 

9 8 



CHILDLIKENESS AND CHILDISHNESS 

man ought to learn, with years, that " there are 
others." 

But that element of the child view which, if 
retained, works most havoc in us is, as I have 
hinted, the lack of power to visualize and realize 
the future. When a baby wants a thing he wants 
it now. The one thing he cannot do with grace is 
to wait. The present, the actual, hems him in 
and dominates him. With years ought to come 
that strongest increment of spiritual power, the 
ability to see the unseen; that is, to see how our 
acts will affect others, how the future. The 
greater a man is, and the manlier, the more he 
weighs these invisible motives and is governed by 
them. 

For what is all defiling greed, and theft, and 
treachery, and sensuality, and spite, and fraud, but 
a reaching forth of sightless and infantine desire, 
ignorant and heedless of the unseen thunder and 
lightning of the moral world? And what are 
heroes but they who in one form or another, in 
quiet domestic sacrifice, or in business integrity, or 
in patriotism, or in religious devotion, have " en- 
dured the cross and despised the present shame 
for the joy that was set before them " ? 

Children are sweet, almost divine, even, in their 
99 



LAME AND LOVELY 

innocent little shortcomings ; but it is because they 
are children. The wisdom concealed in the two 
contradicting texts given above consists in the truth 
that there is, in grown persons, a vast difference 
between childlikeness and childishness. 



100 



PRAYER 

Lord, what a change within us one short hour 
Spent in thy presence will prevail to make! 
Why, therefore, should we do ourselves this 

wrong, 
Or others, that we are not always strong? 
— Richard Chenevix Trench. 

THE gist of the prayer is not asking, but com- 
munion. So the test of prayer is not the 
getting of what we ask, but the sense of the pres- 
ence of Him of whom we have asked it. 

Therefore, all " remarkable answers to prayer/' 
all instances where the thing sought came to sur- 
prise the seeker, and all faith founded upon such 
arguments, contain an element of peril to the 
thoughtful and well-balanced mind. 

For the intelligent believer in God must always 
conceive of the universe as under the control of 
one all-wise will, who knows vastly better what 
ought to be done than we ; and the last thing such 

IOI 



LAME AND LOVELY 

a believer would wish is that this all-wise will 
should be set aside, or influenced in the least by 
his ignorant will. 

The first of all prayers, therefore, and the one 
prayer which contains the seed of all other prayers 
is : " Thy will be done." 

This does not all imply that we are to ask God 
for no favors, such as rain or good crops, health 
or good fortune. In fact, nothing is too small 
or insignificant to ask God for, if it is significant 
enough for me to want. 

Why, then, ask Him for anything, when He 
already knows best, and our only wish is that He 
do as He pleases? 

Right here many have become helplessly puz- 
zled and have given up praying. But the solution 
is a simple one. 

It is best understood by an illustration. God is 
to us as we are to our little children. We do 
not give them all they request, but we wish them 
none the less to keep .confiding in us their wishes. 
In other words we should feel very bad if, because 
we after all are going to do as we think best for 
them, they should be piqued and never speak to us 
again. 

The thing we want of our children is precisely 
1 02 



PRAYER 

communion with them. We want their confidence, 
friendship, presence and prattle. 

So the thing God wants with us, and that we 
need from Him, is the mutual presence, conscious- 
ness, and friendship between us. 

The asking for things is simply one phase of this 
communion. The refusal of them, as well as the 
granting of others of them, is a part of our educa- 
tion ; even as the instances wherein we decline our 
children's requests is a part of their training and 
reveals to them in time our nature. 

Prayer, therefore, is simply an attempt to feel 
God. It is the opening of the heart to let in the 
infinite. It is the union of a man's highest will 
and consciousness with his loftiest conception of 
goodness, nobleness, and beauty. 

Any man who leaves off praying is doing him- 
self a distinct harm. There is no possible excuse 
for it. If he has fallen out with his church, or 
with all churches; if he is incapable of accepting 
recognized creeds; if he doubts the sincerity and 
believes in the delusion of many of those who 
claim sanctity; all these are no reasons why he 
himself, in his own way and in his own heart, 
should not seek to know and feel the infinite. 

The presence of immense and age-long institu- 
103 



LAME AND LOVELY 

tions who are supposed to be the guardians of all 
the truth about God, renders it difficult to think 
originally and simply on the subject. But who- 
ever will have the courage in his own manner and 
according to his own light to try to cultivate a 
sense of God and to come into personal relations 
with the infinite will and heart that is above and in 
all things, will find his life lightened, ennobled, 
and given great strength and poise. 

And the more a man feels that he is what is 
called a " sinner," the more he is conscious of 
having done what he should not, and of coming 
short of his own notions of rectitude and purity 
and an ideal life, the more he needs to cultivate 
in his secret moments the feeling that he can talk 
it over with the invisible Spirit. It is exactly the 
man who is conscious of his unworthiness that the 
spirit of God most easily enters. It will repay 
any man to keep up what Jeremy Taylor called 
44 the practice of the presence of God." 

It may not imply that he join this church or that, 
nor subscribe to this or that creed, but it will mean 
for him a sweeter, richer, solider, kinder, and 
happier life. 



104 



THE SIN OF SENSITIVENESS 

Blessed are the poor in spirit. — Jesus. 
The thirst for applause, if the last infirmity of 
noble minds, is also the first infirmity of weak ones. 

— Ruskin. 

IF we examine sensitiveness under the micro- 
scope we shall find it to be no more nor less 
than a variety of egotism. The sensitive nature 
is simply one that is too much occupied with self. 
That way madness lies, ever. 

I suppose no more exquisite torture has been 
devised by the evil one, at least in this world, than 
the endowing of a highly organized, keenly per- 
ceptive person with a too large self-consciousness. 

In Galsworthy's " Fraternity " such a character 
is drawn with wonderful accuracy by that master, 
in Bianca Dallison. Here are a few of his 
touches : " It was Bianca's fortune to be gifted to 
excess with that quality which, of all others, most 
obscures the real significance of human issues. 

105 



LAME AND LOVELY 

44 Her pride had kept her back from her hus- 
band, till she felt herself a failure, and her pride 
had so revolted at this that it led the way to utter 
estrangement. Her pride even prevented him 
from really knowing what had spoiled their lives 
— her ungovernable itch to be appreciated. This 
was the tragedy of a woman who wanted to be 
loved slowly killing in the man the power of loving 
her." 

Of all the unlit and tortuous places in this world 
the human heart is darkest and farthest past find- 
ing out; and the heart of an intelligent, cultured 
egoist with delicately strung feeling is worst of all. 
The only remedy is the persistent effort toward 
disinterestedness. 

We approach peace only as we leave ourselves 
and come to humanity. No self-forgetful person 
is ever sensitive. No self-forgetful person is 
habitually unhappy. 

This sin of sensitiveness — and we ought to 
face it as a distinct sin, a thing never to be boasted, 
always to be ashamed of — takes many forms. 
Some of them are of that most dangerous kind, the 
kind that resembles virtues. 

For instance, self-examination. There is a sort 
of luxury in probing one's own heart and handling 

1 06 



THE SIN OF SENSITIVENESS 

our faults, like the pleasure of pressing upon a 
sore tooth. 

Conscience may descend to be a species of moral 
indigestion. Copybook philosophy and teachers 
of moral platitudes commend this self-scrutiny. 
But as a rule it is vicious. As with our bodies so 
with our spirits, the healthiest are those that are 
the least tampered with and worried over. The 
noblest soul is the one that is unconscious either 
of nobility or ignobility. The righteousness that 
knows itself and the sin that knows itself are akin 
— both bad. 

Another and common form of this protean soul 
disease is self-depreciation. Wordsworth hits it 
off: 

There is a luxury in self-dispraise; 
And inward self-disparagement affords 
To meditative spleen a grateful feast. 

I wonder if the housewife knows how uncom- 
fortable she makes the guest feel when she pre- 
ludes her dinner with apologies? And does the 
young lady know what an egregious, conceited 
minx she seems to all simple and normal souls when 
she will not begin to play the piano or to sing until 
she has rehearsed her limitations ? 

107 



LAME AND LOVELY 

And there be those women who are forever 
slandering their own appearance, and men forever 
decrying their own ability. This is not humility. 
The one blazing beauty of humility, genuine, is 
that it forgets itself, that the one being it will 
neither blame nor praise is self. 

And worst of all phases of sensitiveness, per- 
haps, is self-pity. Worst, because of it is born a 
deal of plain wickedness. The man who is sorry 
for himself is not far from smashing law and con- 
science for his own dear sake! Of all slops into 
which a manly man or a womanly woman ought 
not fall the maudlin kindness for one's own poor 
soul is the most disgusting. 

I am sure if we stop to reflect that the whole 
troop of degenerates, the murderers and thieves, 
and sneaks and unclean, are uniformly sorry for 
themselves, we should hesitate about allowing our- 
selves to drift into such company. 

Sensitiveness, and all egoisms, are not forms of 
self-respect; they are the opposite of self-respect. 
They are self-defiling, self-condemning, self-de- 
stroying. 

The only religious, sensible thing to do with 
this precious me is to forget him. 



108 



THEY ALL DO IT 

Strait is the gate and narrow is the way that 
leadeth to eternal life, and few there be that find 
it. — Jesus. 

/ believe that, although none other follows the 
doctrine of Jesus, and I alone am left to practise 
it, I cannot refuse to obey it, and that it will give 
me in this world the greatest possible sum of hap- 
piness. — Tolstoi. 

LET us, at least for the moment, consider this 
shattering statement of Jesus, not as describ- 
ing the difficulty of getting into heaven when we 
die, but getting into any sort of success, efficiency, 
and poise of soul while we live. Look at it once, 
not as a day-of-judgment decree, but as a simple 
law of our human nature. 

That law is that whoever gauges and models 
himself after other people is on the road to de- 
terioration and eventually ruin ; that all real moral 
advancement and true success is solitary and along 
" the lone trail." 

109 



LAME AND LOVELY 

Men go to the devil in crowds. One goes 
because the rest are going. The boy gets drunk 
because he does not like to refuse " the fellows." 
The politician steals because he hears they all do 
it. 

In fact, the devil's other name is " They-all-do- 
it." A girl becomes bad usually trying to keep 
step. Almost all vice is social; almost all right- 
eousness that is of any account is purely personal. 

The real gist of any kind of genuine salvation, 
Jew or Gentile, Catholic or Protestant, is that a 
man has formed a partnership of two, himself and 
God, against the universe and all that dwell there- 
in. Saving one's soul is, in its last essence, a sort 
of a declaration of independence, a sworn alle- 
giance to one's own inner, individual convictions 
and ideals and renunciation of all outside authority. 

This makes plain why the Bible tells us to be- 
ware of the world. The world means the mob — 
other people. The prince of this world is one of 
the names Jesus gives Satan. He is " Mr. They- 
all-do-it." * 

When the devil was cast out of the Gadarene 
swine he confessed his name was Legion. God is 
one ; the devil is the many. 

The truth of this appears in ordinary business. 
no 



THEY ALL DO IT 

The kind of clerk that is hardest to find is the one 
who simply does what he ought to do. Says Kip- 
ling: 

Creation's cry goes up 

From age to cheated age, 
Give us the men who do the work 

For which they get the wage ! 

It is a pity, but true as gospel, that the average 
servant is inefficient, the average mother incom- 
petent, the average business man incapable, the 
average actor a poor one, and the average preacher 
a bore. 

In fact, the average of any class of men is below 
the average, so to speak. The world's work is 
carried on by makeshifts. If any man will train 
himself properly and correctly perform the duties 
of his calling, whatever it is, he will find that 
people call him a remarkable person, unusual ! ex- 
traordinary ! 

If you want to amount to anything, follow the 
gleam, satisfy yourself and not others, go in for 
your own self-respect and not the admiration of 
the crowd. The curse of many a youth is that 
he has been content to do as well as those about 
him. 

in 



LAME AND LOVELY 

You have heard possibly many a sermon on 
"What shall I do to be saved?" Here is one 
on " What shall I do to be ruined? " and it is a 
short one: Do nothing! Follow the crowd. 
Aim for the average. 

" For wide is the gate and broad is the way 
that leadeth to destruction, and many there be that 
walk therein." 



112 



THE PRACTICAL USES OF DEATH 

// is expedient for you that I go away. — Jesus. 

The neighborhood of the tomb enlarges the 
mind. The proximity of death sharpens the per- 
ception of truth. — Victor Hugo. 

""QRAGMATISM," says Papini, one of the 

XT Italian exponents of this new-old philos- 
ophy, " lies in the midst of our theories, like the 
corridor in a hotel." 

Which means that, in whatever sectarian or 
partisan chamber you live, you must come down 
to pragmatism if you want to go anywhere. 

In other words, we do not need so much to 
explain and to theorize over the facts and mys- 
teries of life as we need to know what to do with 
them. The greatest question about anything is 
not " Why is it? " but " What will you do with 
it?" 

And right here is where death commends itself 
to the highest ideals and sweetest instincts of man- 
kind, Its function is to be the revealer of what 

"3 



LAME AND LOVELY 

is worth while in life. Quite apart from the con- 
ventional religious teachings about the hereafter, 
the fact of the irrevocable separation involved in 
death, the coming of its dread, silent footstep into 
the house, casts certain clear, sharp lights upon all 
human values. 

There is this in the atmosphere of death: 
Reality at last stands revealed. Whatever be the 
future beyond the grave, when we stand by the 
cold silence of one whom we knew in the warmth 
of love, we can have but one supreme wish — 
that our dealings with the lost and gone had 
been more unselfish, more forbearing, more loyal, 
nobler. 

You may have fumed and fretted with your 
child in the heyday of earthly events, but when 
you come to fold the stiff fingers for the last time 
over the little breast you ask yourself how much 
your worry and fret and petulance were worth. 

In this garden of death bloom the rarest flowers 
of life. Here are humility and gentleness, for- 
giveness and forbearance, sympathy and goodness, 
reverence and awe. 

Why, if no one ever died, if the human herd 
lived on and life had its rude way forever un- 
checked, we should grow hard and merciless and 

114 



PRACTICAL USES OF DEATH 

cruel, our vices instead of being but poison flowers 
would become sturdy upas trees, and all the gentler 
elements of character would take their flight like 
frightened fairies from a midday wood. 

Death, after all, is not harsh and monstrous. 
He is the sweetest, loveliest prophet of nobility. 

We touch the infinite mystery at two points, 
birth and death. And it is the little babies and 
the dying men that continually link us to those 
higher qualities of soul which pertain to the better 
kind of life. 

But the greatest lesson of all which death has 
for us is the truth about love. Here where the 
coffin stands there can be no doubt any more that 
love is " the greatest thing in the world." Here 
the last wretched excuse we made ourselves 
for our impatience and fretfulness disappears 
ashamed. 

Here there is no longer any doubt that it is 
better to give than to receive. Here our mis- 
erable pride and egotism shrivels and expires like 
an accursed Mr. Hyde. 

And here we see things. Here the greed for 
wealth and luxury and power stands unmasked in 
all its salt, leprous reality. In the calcium light 
of death we know, we know through and through 

"5 



LAME AND LOVELY 

our souls, that love was best. We need no minister 
to read: "Though I speak with the tongues of 
men and of angels, and though I have all knowl- 
edge, and though I bestow all my goods to feed 
the poor, and though I give my body to be burned 
and have not love, it profiteth me nothing." 

There is a pocket in the shroud. But it only 
holds a handful of love. This then is the practical 
use of death. It solves no speculative problems, 
it tells us nothing about the mysteries beyond, but 
death does show "clear as the sun, fair as the 
moon, and terrible as an army with banners " that 
honor and truth, virtue and humbleness of mind, 
loyalty and purity — and love are the things worth 
while. 



116 



OTHERWORLDLINESS 

What the writer, the teacher, the pastor, the 
philosopher, has to do is to defend humanity in 
man. — Amiel's JOURNAL. 

SAID Jesus once : " Ye are not of the world, 
even as I am not of the world." And men 
have forgotten the second in striving to realize 
the first part of his saying. That is to say, in 
reaching for otherworldliness they have over- 
looked the manner and pattern of it, the life of 
the Master himself. 

There has always been a deep conviction that 
the man of religious conviction ought in some way 
to be different from ordinary men. This is a 
sound and true feeling, but in what bizarre and 
amazing shapes it has been worked out ! To mark 
the difference between a God's man and a world 
man one will wear a yellow robe and live on 
begged rice, another will shave his head, another 
wears a uniform and a poke bonnet, another wears 
a broad hat and drab garments, another uses no 

117 



LAME AND LOVELY 

buttons but hooks and eyes in their stead, another 
sings no songs but David's Psalms, another will 
use only Latin in worship, some shout and leap 
and some sink into ascetic silence, and thus in a 
thousand ways our poor humanity has tried to be 
" not of this world " so as to secure the approval 
of God, 

And when we brush aside all this mixed and 
marbled history of human headiness and return to 
the Master's words, how simple they are and how 
absurd seem our vagaries! For he says that it 
is " even as I am not of the world " that we are 
to gauge and set our pace. 

And how was his unworldliness ? Did it con- 
sist in strange apparel, or a pious tone of voice, 
or ascetic withdrawal from his fellows? Not in 
any of these outward things. For he dressed as 
far as we know precisely as other carpenters 
dressed; he mingled freely with sinners, in fact, 
preferred their society to that of the saints of his 
day, and in all of the points where we in our folly 
have tried to be unlike the world he was exactly 
like the world. 

His unlikeness to the common run of folks lay 
wholly in his spirit. 

In the midst of a society where the leading 
118 



O THERTVORLDLINESS 

religionists (the Pharisees) were proud, he was 
humble. 

While about him was a sea of selfishness, he 
was unselfish. 

When the world, harsh, cruel, and merciless in 
its conventional slavery, would have cast stones at 
the fallen woman he said: "Neither do I con- 
demn thee. Go and sin no more." 

All around him the world was wrestling, biting, 
elbowing, goring, snarling for so-called success — 
that is, for prominence and power; he shunned 
prominence and refused power. 

The world was mad to rule, to dominate; he 
was " servant of all." 

They sought to get the service of others by 
means of money; he sought only to serve others, 
and needed no money. 

The world believed goodness wa9 a matter of 
conformity to certain conventions; he showed 
how goodness was in the liberation of the in- 
dividual soul from all rule and its unity with God. 

The world was then occupied (and still is oc- 
cupied) in getting; men get on, get rich, get 
famous, get drunk, get educated, and get religion. 
He was busy giving, he got nothing; he gave 
sympathy, gave health, gave bread, gave truth, 

119 



LAME AND LOVELY 

gave himself and his blood. Hence, while the 
great getters have been swept into forgotten 
graves, upon him, the greatest giver, have been 
placed all crowns. 

The world put its trust in force, hate, terror, 
money, armies, and dignities; he staked his all 
on love and service. 

Hence, to this day, he remains the most mar- 
velously misunderstood figure in history. The 
thing that calls itself Christian civilization is nine- 
tenths pagan. Even those organizations that as- 
sume to be his body are often how alien from his 
spirit ! 



120 



THE SERMON OF THE CLOCK 

Yes; when you put on this hat and turn this 
diamond button a little, from right to left — here } 
like this, see? — it presses a bump on your head, 
which no one knows about, and which opens your 
eyes — it is magic, you know — and you see the 
Reality of Things, the Soul of Bread, for instance, 
or of Wine, or of Pepper. — Maeterlinck; 
The Blue Bird. 

Tick tock, tick tock, 

This is the sermon of the clock. 

ONCE there was a very unhappy man. The 
cause of his unhappiness makes no matter. 
It is never of any use to ask why one is miserable ; 
the point is, how can he escape his gloom and 
become happy? In his dumb wretchedness he sat 
down one day and stared at the clock. If you will 
look at anything sympathetically enough and let 
your soul listen you will hear some of the secrets 
of nature. The way to learn nothing is to talk, 

121 



LAME AND LOVELY 

and read, and gabble, and do so continually. Be 
still and things will speak to you. 

Tick tock, tick tock, 

Listen to wisdom, said the clock. 

Furthermore, the clock said: You are a fool. 
This is always the first thing a human being ought 
to grasp. Wisdom abides in the things that are; 
folly and woe abide in the things that ought to be 
and the things that might have been. Hence only 
men are wicked and unhappy. Clocks, trees, rab- 
bits, and fishes take the world as it is; men are 
always trying to change it and wishing it had been 
different. That is why flowers smile and women 
weep. 

Tick tock, tick tock, 

What do you think of that? said the clock. 

Happiness abides somewhere hidden in what is, 
the clock went on to say. The trouble with you 
humans is that you are ever seeking for it in what 
is not Of course, you cannot find it; for, in the 
first place, it is not there ; and, in the second place, 
if it were there you could not get it because there 
is no such place. 

God is, of course. He is happy. It is only the 
122 



THE SERMON OF THE CLOCK 

kind of God that is not, that is angry and vengeful 
and anxious to make people suffer. 

All His universe is set for joy. The sky is glad, 
and the little streams giggle all day, and birds sing 
for love, and fishes wriggle for fun, and even a 
piece of wood is glad it is a piece of wood, and 
milk and bread and honey and fire are all quite 
comfortable bodies. 

Tick tock, tick tock, 

This world is a pretty good world, said the clock. 

People have either too much brains or too little. 
If you consider the idiots you find them usually 
merry. They laugh at nothing at all and play 
with their fingers, as kittens play with their tails. 
And then if you consider the sage you find him 
also happy, because he has come close to the heart 
of what is, which is that thing we call truth ; and 
so he does not fret any more, for he is drinking 
at the hidden stream of joy that flows through the 
universe, through the sun and sand, and through 
little children and the blessed dead. 

Tick tock, tick tock, 

Cabbages are happier than kings, said the clock. 

Yes, yes, continued the clock, happiness is the 
123 



LAME AND LOVELY 

peculiar juice of the isness of things, and not of the 
oughtness. And then, look at me ! What am I 
doing? Why, ticking, of course. It is my busi- 
ness to tick. Now, I have to make four ticks a 
second, or 240 ticks a minute, or 14,440 an hour, 
or 345>6oo a day, and to think of a week makes 
my head reel; and a year amounts to many mil- 
lions, where numbers cease to have any meaning 
and are just trills. 

If I were a fool man I should be everlastingly 
counting up how much I had to do in a week or a 
year, and I should simply give one tremendous 
whizz with my works and quit in despair. Being 
a sensible clock, however, I remember that while 
I have several million ticks to do per year, I have 
just as many seconds to do them in, and do not 
have to work per year at all. I make one tick at 
a time, never bother about those I made or am 
to make, and everything goes off nicely. 

Tick tock, tick tock, 

For every Tick there's a Now, said the clock. 

And you people are just as happy and content 
as we clocks, if you only knew it. 

Most everybody is happy. Our unhappiness 
is borrowed; borrowed from the past in shape of 

124 



THE SERMON OF THE CLOCK 

remorse or regret, and from the future in the shape 
of apprehension. The present is always tolerable. 
You drag up from the pit of the past your sins and 
follies and mistakes, and load them on the poor 
little Now, and when you are not doing that you 
are reaching forward to the future and imagin- 
ing things disagreeable that are going to happen 
and piling them upon the back of poor little 
Now. 

As a matter of fact, the past is not yours. It 
is God's. It belongs to the universe. It has been 
dissolved into the eternities, as a drop of water is 
lost in the sea. It is beyond your control. Let 
it go. All you need take from it is a little wisdom 
to help you to use your own. And the future is 
not yours. That is also God's. 

" Every bud has but once to bloom," says a 
philosopher, " and every flower but one hour of 
perfect beauty. 

" Each star passes but once at night the meridian 
above our heads, and burns there but an instant. 
So each feeling has its floral moment in the heart, 
each thought in the mind's sky its zenithal instant.'' 
Let us watch the punctual universe. All things 
are but one huge clock. 

Your heart has its beats. Earth has its seasons. 
125 



LAME AND LOVELY 

Generations of men come and go as the hours upon 
my face. Everything has its moment. You have 
yours. It is — now! 

For every creature except man, heaven is now. 



126 



ON GOING TO CHURCH 

Vous qui pleurez, venez a ce Dieu, car il pleure. 
Vous qui soufrez, venez a lui, car il guerit. 
Vous qui tremblez, venez a lui } car il sourit. 
Vous qui passez, venez a lui, car il demeure! — 
You that weep, come to this God, for he weeps. 
You that suffer, come to him, for he heals. 
You that tremble, come to him, for he smiles. 
You that pass, come to him, for he abides. 
— Victor Hugo; Lines Written Beneath a 
Crucifix. 

GOING to church is getting to be more and 
more out of the fashion. 
I am convinced that it is a mistake and that we 
are missing much that is fine and worth while. 
Though I share a good deal of the acerbity and 
irritation against the historic institution, yet it does 
not blind me to the immense human value and real 
serviceableness and lovableness of it. 

Hence, though far from following all the im- 
plications and connotations implied in being a 

127 



LAME AND LOVELY 

churchgoer, I go just the same. For I do not 
wish the inference of other folks' minds, or their 
gratuitous assumptions, to deprive me of a sterling 
privilege. Let me here set down some of my 
reasons. 

First, let us define the word. By church I do 
not here refer to any one sect. What is in mind 
is that wider institution, of which each denomi- 
nation is a part, which is made up of human beings 
associated together for the worship of God. That 
is to say the society for the promotion of the re- 
ligious feeling. This includes Jew, Catholic, and 
Protestant. 

I am not ignorant of the mistakes of this organi- 
zation, even of its crimes. I know that religious l 



n J- 

/ ,' 



institutions have persecuted, been cruel and narrow, ; 
and have often opposed science and political prog- j^ 
ress. Neither have I any excuse or apology for 
these things: they were and are wrong and wicked. 
But it is not excuse nor apology to observe what is 
the truth, that in every instance these evils arose 
plainly from the human weakness, ignorance, and 
perversity of the men, and never can be traced to 
the influence of the religious feeling itself. 

The gold of divine love is necessarily alloyed 
with human imperfection; and the things com- 

128 



.,,.,. 



ON GOING TO CHURCH 

plained of came every time from the alloy and 
not from the gold. 

Laying aside its frailties, therefore, with the use 
of a little common sense and sympathy, we note 
first of all that the church is the oldest organi- 
zation on earth. It antedates masonry; no family 
tree has roots so deep; no existing dynasty is so 
venerable. It is a comfort to get hold of some- 
thing that has stood through the centuries. In my 
little meeting house I claim membership and unity 
with that church whose altar fires Moses built in 
the wilderness, whose services were held in the 
catacombs of Rome in the reign of Nero, whose 
lofty cathedrals grace Milan and Cologne, and 
whose weekly gatherings still take place in every 
city and hamlet of the world, whether in Jewish 
synagogue, Catholic church, or Protestant chapel. 

It all means God, one way or another ; it always 
has meant God. I am drawn to this antiquity, 
this persistence, this triumph over time. There's 
a deep thrill in the heart of man in response to 
Bishop Cox's hymn: 

Oh, where are kings and empires now 

Of old that went and came? 
But, Lord, thy church is praying yet, 

A thousand years the same. 
129 



LAME AND LOVELY 

Speaking of the sins of the church, too, it might 
not be out of place to remark that it has always 
been the religious feeling itself that has pointed 
out these sins and demanded and secured reform. 
The church carries in herself her own cure. 

Another, and most human reason, for church- 
going, is that churchgoers as a rule are the best 
kind of people. I speak of averages. 

Of course there are bad people in and good 
people out. But I speak of averages when I say 
that .the clean-minded, honest, straight, kindly, 
generous, and loyal folk gravitate churchward. 
The mass, at least, of the unclean, wicked, criminal, 
false, treacherous, and cruel folk drift from the 
church away. 

On the whole, therefore, I go to church because 
there I find " my kind of folks " ; the kind I want 
to know, to have for my friends and to be my com- 
panions and furnish atmosphere for my children. 
This is not a low motive nor sordid, but high and 
pure. 

Of creed I say nothing, because this writing is 
not about joining the church, but about going to 
church. To go, and there to worship, does not 
necessarily imply that one intellectually assents to 
the theory of the universe set forth by the preacher. 

130 



ON GOING TO CHURCH 

I go to church to develop my religious feeling, 
not to acquire facts. Most important of all rea- 
sons for churchgoing, however, is that it is the 
most practical way of keeping alive and efficient 
one's idea and feeling of God. 

I do not like to have any dark corners walled 
off in my soul where I am afraid to look. I refuse 
to allow any dogmatist or organization to make 
me afraid of God. I want to be familiar with the 
thought of Deity and not ever to turn from it with 
a shudder or a shrug, as men turn from a fear or 
from a hopeless puzzle. Now, we may talk as we 
please about finding God in trees and books, in 
poetry and in our meditations, but human nature 
is human nature, and unless we give regular ex- 
pression to an emotion or conviction it will die of 
inanition. 

The race is some thousands of years old and is 
some wiser than you or I, and the experience of 
the race is that stated times of worship alone keep 
alive the disposition to worship. Moses knew 
what he was doing when he inserted among the 
commandments the order to devote every seventh 
day to the religious feeling. On the whole, there- 
fore, I am sure any right-minded person will be 
helped by regular attendance at church. 

I3i 



THE EYE OF THE SOUL 

// thine eye he single thy whole body shall be 
full of light. — Jesus. 

What a man aspires to is the creative cause in 
his life, what he forever is to be. — Edward 
Howard Griggs. 

THE expression, " the single eye," is some- 
times used with a ludicrous misunderstanding 
of the word as found in our King James version 
of the New Testament, where it is employed in its 
obsolete sense of " whole " or " healthy." 

Well-meaning people have expressed their wish 
to have " an eye single to God's glory," or to their 
duty, in which the idea is that of looking at one 
thing and not at two. The phrase in our Bible, 
however, simply refers to the advantages of having 
a good eye over having a bad or diseased eye. 

The eye may be taken as the most practical and 
serviceable of all our organs. It puts us most in 
communication with the outside world. By it 

132 



THE EYE OF THE SOUL 

through one lens we range the ultimate stars; and, 
through another, we perceive the infinitesimal 
forms and motions of the cell world. What the 
eye is to the body the instincts are to the soul. 

As all the things we learn by reason are small 
in their sum compared to the myriad things we 
learn through the glance; so the wisdom, virtue, 
commandments, creeds, and counsel we gather by 
instruction in the spirit, are small compared to that 
higher, quicker, more perfect, and more infallible 
wisdom we obtain by the direct sensing of our 
spiritual eye of feeling and appreciation. 

If you want a book in a room upstairs and if 
you tell me to go and find it with my eyes shut, 
what numberless and minute directions you must 
give ! I must take so many steps to the right and 
as many to the left, and guide myself by the hands 
passed along this and that object, and the like! 
Whereas, if you tell me to go with my eyes open 
and bring you the blue book lying on your dresser 
by the pin tray, I can find it a hundred times more 
easily and infallibly. 

It is precisely the same in making one's moral 
way through life. A few sound instincts and clear 
ideals are better than reams of rules. No system 
of ethics, saturated with wisdom of antiquity, and 

133 



LAME AND LOVELY 

approved by all the philosophers of earth, is of 
much practical use to a morally blind man. 

The business of living a pure, true, and right 
life is, therefore, after all, a simple one, and not 
complex. Follow your deepest longings, heed 
your inner repulsions. Keep sound and sane and 
follow your nose. 

There is more purity in the instinctive shrinking 
of a simple maid than in all the infinite maneuvers 
of propriety. There is more worship in the child's 
wonder at the thunder and admiration before the 
flaming sunset than in all the formulas of heathen 
ceremonies or Christian ascriptions. There is 
more true repentance in the misery of an honest 
man at telling a lie or doing any mean action than 
in the longest litanies. 

It is not only human to err, it is just as human 
to feel sorry that we have erred. The nobler, 
finer instincts and ideals of life are as innate as 
original sin. Every man knows them. 

It is when we cease obeying them instantly and 
begin arguing with them, that we fall into the 
sloughs of moral confusion. 

And what Jesus came to do for us was not 
to guide us from without, but from within; not to 
give us objective, external laws to guide us, but to 

134 



THE EYE OF THE SOUL 

awaken in us a lambent, guiding principle. He 
came " to open the eyes of the blind." His dy- 
namic is not implicit obedience, but " perfect love." 

This explains all that mystical-sounding lan- 
guage of the New Testament that speaks of 
41 Christ formed within," " I in you and you in 
me," " if any man will open the door I will come 
in and sup with him," and so forth. All of which 
means that Jesus' aim is to be an inspiration of the 
individual moral forces, an enkindling of personal 
perceptive powers, the awakening of the soul to 
its normal moral functioning. 

No man, no teacher, not even Christ himself, 
can guide a man, so as to develop his manhood 
as well as keep him from harm, except such teacher 
or Christ enter into a man, by his personal influ- 
ence, and strengthen and clear " the eye of the 
soul." 



*35 



LOVING GOD 

Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God.* — Jesus. 
Nulla sine Deo mens bona est. — No mind is 
good without God. — Seneca. 

PERHAPS of all words in human speech none 
is more elastic than love. It means as many 
different things as there are minds. It is the one 
word which when a man speaks means no more 
nor less than his personality. It is the gist, sub- 
stance, and quintessence of what he is; more, of 
what he longs to be ; for 

The thing we long for, that we are 
For one transcendent moment. 

When you say, therefore, that you love a man, 
a woman, a child, or God, we cannot have much 
idea of what you mean until we know you. Pious 
folk express their most exalted ideal, the feeling 
of their union with God, and even describe the 
nature of deity itself by this word; while vicious 
and perverted creatures use precisely the same 

136 



LOVING GOD 

word to express their lowest form of selfishness. 

Love is thus self-revealing. Our truest formula 
of belief consists not in what our minds assent to 
and our reason acknowledges, but rather in what 
our desires are drawn to. A soul sometimes de- 
ceives itself in what it says, for our words are 
themselves but thought forms borrowed from 
others; and in what it does, for few of one's acts 
carry with them one's utter approval; but no soul 
is ever deceived in what it likes. 

Let us analyze, as far as we can, this thing called 
love, using the term in its highest sense, and mean- 
ing the emotion that beautifies the family, pre- 
serves friendship, and appropriates God. 

First of all it is a distinct emotion. It comes, 
as we say, from the heart, and not from the intel- 
lect or the will. As near as we can define it, it is 
that pleasurable feeling aroused in us by the pres- 
ence of the beloved object in our thoughts. 

It is well not to drift away from this common- 
sense basis. No intellectual process, no speech nor 
act, can be called love, unless it be heated from our 
subconscious self by this strange fire. We love a 
man or a book or a flower, only as the thought of 
the object in question gives us pleasure, and stirs 
this emotion. 

137 



LAME AND LOVELY 

Those who talk of loving God, therefore, when 
there is no inward joy, no stir of the feeling in 
some ardent measure, are clearly mistaken. They 
may obey God, or approve of Him, or fear Him, 
but they do not love Him except He makes in them 
some spot of gladness. 

Is it not absurd then, it may be inquired, to com- 
mand us to love God? Can love be forced by the 
will? If it cannot, and it certainly cannot, as it 
lies beneath the will and moves before the will, 
why should Jesus put as the supreme " duty " of 
man the love of God ? 

The answer to this plain and substantial objec- 
tion is this: that the command to love anything 
essentially good and beautiful is no more nor less 
than a command to learn to know it. 

We are justified in commanding any human be- 
ing to love, for instance, Shakespeare's or Ra- 
phael's works, because by common consent such 
art ought to and does appeal to a normal, healthy 
taste. 

So we ought to love the beauties of nature, and 
deeds of heroism, self-sacrifice, and the like, and 
little children. The obligation here consists in 
our being human; whoever does not like such 
things steps aside from the human race, he is 

138 



LOVING GOD 

perverted, and is a subject for the alienist and not 
for the moralist 

God, no matter what our religion may be, so 
long as it is civilized, stands for the perfection of 
human character. In Him are all those excel- 
lencies every right-minded person wants to possess. 
Naturally, therefore, simply to conceive of such a 
being must awaken in us love to Him. 

If the thought of God is distasteful to us, we 
either have a false and distorted notion of what 
God is, or our tastes are perverted and our backs 
turned upon what we know to be really worth 
while. 

The command to love God is a command to 
know God, to think of Him, to come into the in- 
fluence of His personality. Once we see God we 
can no more help glowing in love to Him than we 
can help the glow in our hearts when we see a 
perfect rose, a gorgeous sunset, a kind deed, or an 
innocent child. 

The curse of sensualism, of selfishness, of hate, 
of greed, and of all flesh-centered or ego-centered 
passions is that they stop up the eye of the soul. 
" Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see 
God." 

Lowness, pessimism, and all bitter and base 
139 



LAME AND LOVELY 

thinking not only prevent us from seeing God, but 
also from seeing anything else that is worth seeing. 
Bound in such meshes we cannot see a woman as 
her spirit should be looked on, nor a man for what 
he really is, nor any of the moral loveliness of the 
universe. 

I do not ask that your idea of God be the same 
as mine, for perhaps both of us are far from the 
truth, but it is right to demand of any man that he 
have some notion or mental image of the highest, 
truest, noblest things in life; whatever your God 
may be He ought to be no less than that; and you 
are missing the meaning of life if you don't love 
Him. 



140 



THE USES OF CONFESSION 

Sincerite, comme le feu, purifie tout ce qu'elle 
embrasse. — Sincerity, like fire, purifies everything 
it embraces. — Maeterlinck. 

One can have my confession without having my 
heart; when one has my heart, he needs no con- 
fession of mine; all is open to him. 

— La Bruyere. 

WHEN the whole world has tried a truth and 
found it good it compresses it into a prov- 
erb. One of these compressed tablets of ever- 
lasting truth is: Confession is good for the soul. 
To confess a sin or a mistake, a weakness or 
a fault, in some way separates it from our souls 
and, as Maeterlinck says, purifies it as by fire, 
sterilizes its dangerous germs. 

So to open a heart is to cure it. Only our 
concealed, disavowed, or unconscious sins eat into 
the soul and attack the life principle. 

This is true in our relations with each other. 
141 



LAME AND LOVELY 

The little child that goes frankly to his mother 
and admits his disobedience is taken quickly into 
the arms of love. Man and wife who live in a 
continual white clarity of mutual confession have 
an unbreakable peace, a love bastioned and secure 
against all attack. 

In society it is not the known but the unknown 
vice that is dangerous. Every exposed fraud, 
every aired scandal, every known scoundrel is a 
red flag of warning to the young and innocent. It 
is the prosperous, devious, and secret wrongdoing 
that spreads its cancerous roots wide and sinks 
them deep into the body politic. 

Newspapers are a sort of public confessional. 
What is known is half cured. No one hates the 
organ of publicity as much as the corrupter of 
public virtue, the agent of private fraud, who 
needs darkness for his success. 

Confession is impossible between man and man 
unless there be some sort of moral stature in the 
one confessed to greater than in the one who 
confesses. 

To a soul nobler than myself I can speak freely 
of my cowardices, my falseness, my lapses. As 
I talk to him even my envy and littleness, my 
egotism, vanity, disloyalty, and selfishness, I know 

142 



THE USES OF CONFESSION 

not how, seem to lose their septic and dangerous 
quality and to become objects of curious interest. 

What a relief, what sweet joy, to find a friend 
from whom you have been estranged, perhaps by 
some fault of yours, and to lay bare your weakness 
and wrong in plain, surgical strokes. In some 
mysterious way, out of your very evil there springs 
a tenderness, a strength of mutual affection which 
was unknown before. What would lovers be with- 
out lovers' quarrels and the making up ? 

It is precisely this psychological quality that 
characterizes our relation to the infinite — to 
God, under whatsoever form we conceive Him. 
Whether it be the prostration before the ancient 
altar of sacrifice, whereon burns the lamb of atone- 
ment, or the whispered outpourings of a troubled 
heart through the wicker of the confessional, or 
the prayers and groans at the Methodist mourners' 
bench, or the Salvation Army's penitent form, the 
principle is the same. The soul is unveiling itself. 

Just to say, to admit, to avow what we are, in 
the face of infinite goodness, floods the life with 
a cleansing stream. It is for this reason that all 
religions have placed confession, in one form or 
another, as the central point of their ritual. 

For confession is, at its core, sincerity. It is 
143 



LAME AND LOVELY 

only in sincerity that the soul can breathe deep 
breaths, that life is free and joyous. To live in 
conscious deception with those we love is to walk 
with feet entangled with strands. We are ever 
on the watch. There is no peace, no utter relax- 
ation. Those men and women whose private 
moral code admits the doing of things unconfess- 
able live a fevered and restless existence. 

The first thing is peace with the infinite. Even 
if a man belongs to no church at all, if the impli- 
cations of institutional religion repel him, let him 
in certain quiet moments call up his soul and lay 
bare his deepest self to his own ideal of God; let 
him admit himself, avow and confess himself, and 
he will carry from his silent interview a lighter 
heart than he has known. 

Nothing is more foolish than dodging the idea 
of God and evading His presence in the thought. 
I would that all unchurched men might lay aside 
their prejudices, the various ideas about God which 
they have been taught, and all notions of their own 
fitness or unfitness, and open their mind's door and 
invite in whatever they believe God to be, and 
then and there strip themselves of all subterfuge, 
of all supposed goodness and supposed badness, 
and be once sincere with the infinite — fearlessly, 

144 



THE USES OF CONFESSION 

confidently sincere, as a child before his father, as 
a creature before him that made him, as a being 
of half lights, mysteries, and shadows before the 
sun. 

Whoever commences to live a white, honest life 
in the face of his inner ideal, will begin to be honest 
with himself. And whoever is downright and 
square with himself is the only one who can pos- 
sibly be loyal to his friends. 

To thine own self be true, 

And it must follow 2 as the night the day, 

Thou canst not then be false to any man. 

14 And hereby," says John the beloved, " we 
know that we are of the truth and shall assure our 
hearts before him. For if our hearts condemn us 
not, then have we confidence toward God." 



145 



THE HEART OF FATALISM 

That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by 
the prophet. — Matthew. 

There are many truths that seem repugnant and 
contrary one to the other, yet which subsist to- 
gether in admirable agreement. The source of 
most religious errors is the exclusion of one or the 
other of these truths. — Pascal. 

ONE of the most striking and suggestive say- 
ings of the gospel is the naive explanation 
Matthew gives of this and that act of Jesus, " that 
it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the 
prophet." It is a luminous expression, masterful, 
dramatic. 

One sees a life moving according to programme 
laid out ages ago; a personal career which rises 
from a petty thing of chance and becomes a part 
of unfolding destiny, a cog in the great wheel of 
time; it is fatalism, but only the sweet juice of 
fatalism, with the bitter rind thrown away. 
Every doctrine has some good and some bad in 
146 



THE HEART OF FATALISM 

it. Any statement of truth, followed to an ex- 
treme exclusion of all other truths, becomes un- 
reason. 

And there is a vast deal of truth and comfort 
in the old creed of predestination. There is a 
sense of rest comes to the mind with a realization 
of the sovereign and all-compelling will of God. 
Always, of course, provided one believes, as we 
might say, in moderation, and does not push his 
faith to the point of paralysis. 

For, while predestination is true, it is not the 
whole truth, for no truth can be wholly crowded 
into a statement — nothing but life can perfectly 
inclose or express truth. It is not the word made 
printer's ink; it is the word made flesh, which is 
complete, well rounded, and safe to follow. 

The source of dissipation in life is the feeling 
that one is the creature and puppet of chance. 
Hence spring our mad follies, our profligate 
wastes, our toxic pleasures and septic negligence. 
If it's all luck, then let us eat, drink and be merry, 
for to-morrow we die. 

When one speaks of destiny, one ordinarily 
refers to one event only in life — to-wit: death. 
But the end of life is not the only part that 
is scheduled. It is all according to programme. 

*47 



LAME AND LOVELY 

We are born each on his appointed day, as much 
as Jesus himself came not until " the fullness of 
time." And every man's life is a plan of God, 
as Bushnell puts it. The varied structure of our 
days is made after some plan drawn upon the 
divine trestle board. There are blue prints and 
specifications in heaven for each soul's growth. 

A conviction like this must give one poise. It 
corrects the dangerous extremes of despair and 
overconfidence. It takes away worry. It re- 
moves our nervous sense of haste. " He that 
believeth shall not make haste." It spreads a 
summer calm throughout our thoughts. It clears 
the brain and steadies the hand. The spirit of 
man becomes a candle of the Lord. 

In some form this sense of programme. is dis- 
cernible in every great man. It is the essence of 
heroism. Napoleon called it his star. Socrates 
spoke of his daimon, who whispered him advice. 
Caesar bade the frightened boatmen have no fear, 
for Caesar was on board, and his fortunes. 

The remarkable courage of the Japanese springs 
from their perfect acceptance of fate. And what- 
ever force there is in Islam is traceable to the same 
source. 

When we exclaim that we cannot accept fatalism 
148 



THE HEART OF FATALISM 

we are guilty of our western fault, which is — 
logic. Carrying fatalism to its logical extreme, 
it is a deadening thing, and produces only a stoic 
stolidity. But why carry it to an extreme ? 

The art we western people need to learn is to 
extract the feeling, the flavor, the life element, 
out of a dogma, and not run it down to its pitiless 
logical end. For, as I have said, there is not a 
solitary credo, whether in Christianity, positivism, 
rationalism, or in any other religion or philosophy 
which does not become eventually false and salt 
and bitter, if treated with pure reason alone. 

It is only in the temperamental mixture and 
blend of all the great truths that we gain wisdom 
and peace. 

Let me feel, therefore, that this day is marked 
out for me ; that the past, good and bad, is inevit- 
able [even if it was not], and is now dissolved into 
the ocean waters of the infinite purpose; that the 
future is moving toward me as fixedly as the past 
is receding; that all reform and right work, all 
truth and goodness and noble action are almighty; 
their failure is only seeming; they have in them- 
selves the very toughness and conquering inde- 
structibility of God himself; that every mean deed 
and impure thought and cruel gratification and 

149 



LAME AND LOVELY 

unworthy self-indulgence must meet its purifying 
pain and whitening grief some time, somewhere; 
that the stars are my friends and the three fates 
are motherly souls ; that whatever power made the 
lily and clothes it, created the sparrow and marks 
its fall, has also a place and programme for me ; in 
fine, let me, in my little corner also, go about my 
Father's business, even as the Great Teacher, with- 
out fear or haste or heat, moving as planets move, 
doing what I may do " that it might be fulfilled 
which was spoken by the prophet." 



150 



A PREACHMENT TO PREACHERS 

My dear brother: You are indeed out of your 
flace y for you are reasoning when you ought to be 
praying. — Yours truly, John Wesley. 

FROM the layman in the pews this silent appeal 
rises to the minister in the pulpit : he that hath 
ears to hear let him hear ! 

What we want from you, sir, is but one thing — 
yourself. 

If you preach Christ, it does us no good, unless 
you preach him in terms of your own personal life. 
The historic Christ and the doctrinal and tabulated 
Christ we, as well as you, can get from books. 

We want no words from you except those that 
are red with your blood. 

We do not want the Word, but the Word made 
Flesh. 

We do not want you to arouse our emotions ; we 
want to see you gripped by your own. 

We do not want argument; we do not want 
151 



LAME AND LOVELY 

anything proved to us ; for where you lay one doubt 
you raise twenty. 

We do not want information; all its sources are 
open to us as well as to you. We do not want 
science, history, or philosophy; we want of you 
what we want of the one great neighbor — heart. 

Please go through your sermon, before you 
bring it to us, and cut out every platitude, every 
fine-sounding phrase, everything that you will say 
just because you think your church requires it, or 
because it is your duty to say it. Give us only 
what you cannot help saying. 

We ask you to compete with novels and stories 
in one thing — human interest. 

We ask you to compete with poets in just one 
thing — vision. 

We ask you to compete with men of science in 
just one thing — absolute honesty. 

We ask you to compete with those who make us 
bad in just one thing — in that you like us. 

We do not need your guidance; we need your 
confession — that shall most truly guide us. 

Do not berate us; we know how bad we are. 
Do not dictate to us; for the soul leaps to truth 
and not authority. Do not urge us ; for souls that 
can see need no urging. Simply show us one who 

152 



A PREACHMENT TO PREACHERS 

is in the clutch of some reality; then we shall be 
shamed and smitten, reborn and set on the right 
way. 

Do not entertain us. You cannot compete with 
the actor. Strip your soul naked to us and show 
us what no man can simulate — life in its pure 
motion. 

Speak low. The things you should have to 
say are secrets. Every man's religion is utterly 
modest; it is his most shrinking and sensitive vital 
spot. 

Remember that we are interested in the ultimate 
things — love, life, God and death. Whenever 
you mention one of these things we are anxious to 
hear if you have any light. Remember that the 
spirit of this age is not as the spirit of former ages. 
Learn these words of Griggs: " Our interest 
everywhere these days is in the distinctively per- 
sonal. If one can tell openly and clearly the story 
of his own life, there are many who will find deep 
interest in this. Literature is becoming more and 
more autobiographical. It all means the deepen- 
ing consciousness of the absolute significance of 
the human soul." 

It is not doctrines any more we want. It is not 
theorems and saving formulas. We want doc- 

153 



LAME AND LOVELY 

trines incarnated, theorems shining through souls, 
formulas that are the aureoles of experience. 

Holy church has become a trysting place for our 
souls with yours. 

We do not want to believe ; we want to see. 

We do not want gold any more, but the gold 
mine; not money, but the bank and mint; not the 
law, but the lawgiver; not the botany of Christ, 
but the rose of Christ; not the sermon, but the 
human being behind it. We, too, " seek not 
yours, but you ! " 



BEYOND THE GRAVE 

// in this life only we have hope in Christ we 
are of all men most miserable. — Saint Paul. 

THE idea of immortality is one that is most 
tenaciously clung to by our sentiments and 
most conclusively rejected by materialistic reason- 
ing. 

There is danger that the mind of the average 
intelligent person, trained to the strict honesty and 
self-control of modern scientific methods, will put 
aside the sweet persuasion as belonging to the 
myths and guesses of former ages of ignorance. 
Let us, therefore, state succinctly the grounds upon 
which an enlightened, strictly truthful intelligence 
bases such a belief. 

And, first, the whole matter must be recognized 
as lying outside of and beyond the realm of ac- 
curate knowledge. 

It has no kinship with botany, mathematics, 
chemistry, or any of the other exact sciences. It 
lies rather in that region which every cultured 

155 



LAME AND LOVELY 

scientist to-day acknowledges to exist, where the 
overtones of truth play, where are the deep mys- 
teries of the personality, the subliminal instincts, 
and the finer esthetic perceptions. 

These things, of course, are just as real, 
though not so well defined, as the exact sciences, 
and have quite as much, if not more, to do with 
life. 

All materialistic proofs of a future life, there- 
fore, such as psychic research and spiritualistic 
performances, may be set aside as hardly consistent 
with intellectual self-respect. 

The profoundest argument perhaps is the one 
emphasized by Emerson, who says that " when 
God has a point to carry with the race he plants 
his arguments in the instincts." The fact that the 
conviction that personality will outlast death is 
as old as humanity, has never been absent from 
human experience, and is practically acknowledged 
universally to-day, has great force. So persistent 
a phenomenon of human consciousness goes a long 
way toward proving that it corresponds to a fact. 

Science, as John Fiske points out, has nothing 
more to do with the matter than to weigh this 
fact. Science does not prove immortality impos- 
sible. He says : " In the course of evolution 

156 



BEYOND THE GRAVE 

there is no more philosophical difficulty in man's 
acquiring immortal life than in his acquiring the 
erect posture and articulate speech." 

The most convincing proof of our continued 
existence, however, to thoughtful persons is the 
fact that, without this, life loses its moral signifi- 
cance. The next world is inextricably bound up 
with our ethical sense. And that not merely by 
tradition, but by a profound reason, which has been 
truly felt, though fantastically stated, by men since 
the beginning of time. 

The point is that moral motives are too long to 
fit this earthly short career. All the higher, more 
humanizing, subtler, and more altruistic sentiments 
are too cramped for room. They cannot fitly 
play inside a space of thirty-three years or so. 

Brutal, bestial, sensual, and all destructive 
emotions reap a quick harvest. Their reward is in 
their hand. The selfish man gets what he goes 
after. He makes his money, he sates his lust, he 
fills the measure of his pride, and, as with the 
beasts, death comes mercifully with the decay of 
his powers, so that his term is in a way rational. 

But the rewards of virtue are long and slow. 
The increment of goodness seems a cosmic process 
that needs not days but centuries. Honesty is 

157 



LAME AND LOVELY 

not the best policy always, within a period of a 
year nor of a lifetime; we feel it to be the best 
policy always only when it can get a chance to 
outlive all opposition. 

Even so loyalty, purity, nobility, and all the 
diviner traits of men only have chance to stand 
erect when they can pierce through death. The 
world would miss its proudest instances of manly 
strength and womanly beauty if there should be 
taken away all cases where men and women went 
smiling to death for a principle. 

Hence, to remove from men the feeling that 
another life supplements this would cut the nerve 
of moral emotion ; it would remove the halo from 
our flesh; it would rub out our tint of divinity; it 
would eliminate all that far-reaching heroism of 
souls that leads them to commit themselves utterly 
to noble aims. 

Efface heaven, and the result is psychologically 
sure — there would be left for us but the slough of 
the senses more or less refined, and instead of 
" enduring the cross and despising the shame for 
the joys set before us," we should adopt the advice 
of Propertius: 

" Dum licet inter nos igitur laetamur amantes; 
non satis est ullo tempore longus amor. — Let us 

i 5 8 



BEYOND THE GRAVE 

enjoy pleasure while we can; pleasure is never long 
enough." 

The world would be poor without its Nathan 
Hale, and Wiclif, and Savonarola, and Bruno, and 
Paul, and Socrates, and Jesus, all of whom had 
moral contents that spilled over death. 

The best reason for keeping heaven is because 
it is needed. 



159 



YOKE JOY 

And establish thou the work of our hands upon 
us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it! 

— Moses. 

Wind and Wave and Sun, how regenerative 
these elder brothers are! — William Sharp. 

NATURE forgets nothing. 
She not only produces with inexhaustible 
fecundity but she keeps on producing the same 
kind of things. 

Like the witches in " Macbeth," she sings: 
" I'll do, and I'll do, and Til do," and she does the 
third time what she did first. We emphasize the 
fact that no two blades of grass are exactly alike, 
and no two waves, and no two faces; but the most 
striking factor in the case, after all, is that all grass 
blades are on the same pattern, and all waves and 
faces. 

Yesterday the sun rose in the east and set in the 
west; to-morrow and forever it will repeat the 
same performance. Rain ascends from the ocean, 

1 60 



YOKE JOY 

journeys on cloud ships to the mountains, is con- 
densed and rolls down in rivers to the sea once 
more, a huge, endlessly turning water wheel. 

Beavers build the same kind of dams to-day 
they built in the four rivers of Eden, and hens lay 
the same sort of eggs that Eve boiled for Adam's 
breakfast. Bees make honey in the same shaped 
cells and of the same sweetness and by the same 
process their ancestors used for the honey Samson 
found in the lion's carcass and turned into a riddle. 

Nature produces a new thing only by infinitely 
repeating the old with minutest variations. It 
took her eons and centuries to create a human 
arm, for instance, having practiced for a tremen- 
dous space of time on the foreleg of the quad- 
ruped, the wing of the bird, and the flipper of the 
sea creature. And how many millions of experi- 
ments with sensitive skin dots before she could 
bring forth an eye to feel light or an ear to ex- 
perience sound ! 

Atoms and molecules, as well as the people of 
New England, are characterized by doing just as 
they always have done. Otherwise there would 
be no such thing as science. 

The reason why coal ignites at a certain tem- 
perature, why oxygen and hydrogen leap together 

161 



LAME AND LOVELY 

under certain conditions and separate under cer- 
tain other circumstances, is precisely the same rea- 
son why the ladies' aid society at Worcester, 
Mass., always serves cold ham and hot coffee and 
beans at the church supper, and why waiters wear 
dress suits — " they always have." 

In the forest the willow drops its arms, the oak 
extends them straight out, and the poplar holds 
them up, because they have the habit. Every- 
thing is old, old, old; even our hunger for some- 
thing new — the Greeks had it. 

Now, if nature is such a slave to habit, it must 
follow that habit is a good thing. Nature is sat- 
urated with joy; nature everlastingly repeats; 
hence if we would attain joy, let us seek it in rep- 
etition. That is a perfectly good syllogism. 

And it works out excellently well in practice. 
Most of our pleasure comes from the acts we per- 
form over and over again; as breakfast, dinner, 
and supper; sleep and daily work, the Saturday 
holiday and the Sunday rest. To get religious en- 
joyment firmly fixed in us Jehovah prescribed 
every seventh day for it. 

In proportion as a pleasure is healthful, normal 
and permanent, it is found in grooves. Oppo- 
sitely, as we become unhealthy and perverted we 

162 



YOKE JOY 

seek happiness principally in strange and unusual 
sources. Not that there is no pleasure in what is 
new, only it is not dependable. To expect con- 
tentment from novelty is to be glad occasionally, 
and miserable generally; while to train one's self 
to get the zest and fun of life from its ordinary 
course, is to enter into partnership with great 
Nature's self. 

The old distinction between happiness and joy is 
in point. Happiness just " happens"; that is, 
comes now and then, and by chance; joy, however, 
is in the nature of things; it is the condition of 
spirit arising from being in harmony with the 
universe. 

No class of people will you find more wretched 
than those whose pleasure consists in novelty, such 
as gamblers, the " smart set," and all who are con- 
tinually buying new gowns, new automobiles, new 
houses and new wives. 

They have fun, but it is in rare oases dotting 
desert wastes. All aristocracies and plutocracies 
who have no work to make them happy, float as a 
green scum upon the vast, sweet, healthy pool of 
humanity; they are an exanthematous excretion 
upon the surface of the huge, sound body of the 
race, which is made up of children and letter 

163 



LAME AND LOVELY 

carriers, bricklayers and scientists, typewriter girls 
and grocers, tinkers, tailors and candlestick mak- 
ers. 

How carefully wrong we have all been trained! 
Success we imagine to consist in escaping from 
those who work for a living to sit among those 
who work only when they please. 

Quite the contrary, the contented portion of the 
earth's population consists of those who work 
when the bell rings, whether they feel like it or 
not. For they have heard the voice of Nature, 
who cries, saying: 

" Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, 
and ye shall find rest for your souls." 

Nature's peace is yoke peace. It lies within 
the usual. The devil's peace, whose end is ashes, 
is alcohol-jewelry- fame-novelty peace. 



164 



THE SOUL LAOCOON 

The Laocoon of Virgil! . . . I know of one 
more terrible. It is the one smothered and de- 
voured by serpents issued from his own heart. — 

— Catulle Mendes. 
The prosperity of fools shall destroy them. — 

— Solomon. 

MODERN life is engaged in a tremendous 
effort to " look pleasant." Literature of 
the day is inundated with streams of advice, ur- 
ging us all to cheer up. Those philosophers are 
the fashion who tell us that nothing matters much 
so long as we chew our food well and don't worry. 
And the most successful of present day propagan- 
dists are they who reveal to us that there is no hell, 
no devil, no wrong, no dark, and no pain. Mean- 
while hearts continue to break, homes to be ship- 
wrecked, mouths to be full of the ashes of excess, 
fortunes to be lost, quarrels to develop, and chil- 
dren to have the gripes. 

The great fact, eternal as the race, is tragedy. 

i6 5 



LAME AND LOVELY 

Not for nothing the great creative minds, from 
iEschylus to Shakespeare, hold up to us the pol- 
ished mirror of their verse and show us often the 
divine human face stone smitten with a Medusa 
look and snake haired with horrors* 

And the secret of triumph lies in knowing how 
to adjust one's self to the fact of sorrow. All 
sorts of cure-alls have been hawked down the 
streets of time. 

One cult says of woe, laugh at it ; another, inflict 
such penitential torments on yourself that you 
outdo it; another, face it stolidly; another, deny it, 
notwithstanding the facts; another, join our insti- 
tution, which will insure you against it, if not in 
this world, in the next; and so on. But the wise of 
all ages have discerned the healing truth about it, 
which is that all real trouble as well as all real 
peace is from one's own heart, and in one's own 
inner court is the real arena of triumph or of 
defeat. 

There is not a single tragedy in history, as 
Maeterlinck points out, in his " Wisdom and Des- 
tiny," where fatality really reigns. External fa- 
talities there do seem to be, such as sickness, 
accident, the deeds of the wicked, and the death 
of them we love; but such a thing as an internal 

166 



THE SOUL LAOCOON 

fatality does not exist. The hero always tri- 
umphs ; at least in that forum where alone triumph 
or defeat has any meaning — that is, within his 
own heart. 

Success and failure in life, then, are in no sense 
dependent upon anything but myself, and neither 
are they in any least degree the sport of chance; 
they come by laws as sure in their operation as the 
laws that move the sun. In other words, every 
wretched man is a Laocoon tangled and crushed 
by the serpents issued from his own self. 

Among these serpents the most common are the 
bodily appetites that have been allowed to stran- 
gle the will. To change the comparison, it is as 
if a man drives his sledge over the snows of des- 
tiny, guiding strong wolves, which pull him for- 
ward so long as he drives them, but turn and rend 
him when he loses control. 

Foremost comes alcohol, which has paralyzed 
how many a noble will, and burned to the ground 
how many a spirit's dwelling it might have 
cheered! There is no drunkard that is not a 
spiritual suicide. And the first point in the re- 
demption of an alcoholic pervert is that he real- 
izes that, as no one made him drink except 
himself, so no one can cure him, except himself. 

167 



LAME AND LOVELY 

Alcoholism is never hopeless; one can always 
quit. 

It is the spiritual condition of an impotent will 
that is hopeless. 

Worse than this, however, and worse than any- 
thing, is the perversion of the creative instinct. 
The feeling that attracts man to woman is the 
most sacred and strong of all the desires of the 
body. When this passion ceases to be a mastered 
force, at once warming and sanctifying life, and 
becomes a python, torturing and crushing its vic- 
tim, there ensues the bitterest death in life. The 
most appalling of all ruins is the ruin of love. 

We might also speak of greed, of ambition, of 
idleness, of envy, of hate, of egotism, of pride, 
and the hundred and one other snakes that are 
nested in the human heart, hatched in the warmth 
of self-satisfied ignorance and increased at length 
to the size of tragedy. 

The cure and banishment of all such things is 
found in love and wisdom; love fixed on no less 
object than utter perfection — God. For to love 
God is to let into one's life the forces of the in- 
finite. Love means admiration and self-giving. 
To admire and to give one's self up to such an 
ideal as is presented to us in Jesus, is to admit into 

168 



THE SOUL LAO COON 

our hearts the most antiseptic of all emotions, to 
receive into our wills the most tonic of all spiritual 
potencies. 

And wisdom. That is, first of all, teachable- 
ness, the recognition of our ignorance. It means 
the openness to truth, and the closure against all 
such fraudulent imitations of truth and alleged 
substitutes for truth, as superstition, custom, and 
authority. 

Reason, enlighted by wisdom, the knowledge 
and practice of the laws of the universe; and the 
heart, lit up by love, the invigoration streaming in 
from God and from good men and women ; these 
are they that shall rescue the Laocoon soul from 
its own serpent brood. 



169 



THE CENTER OF THINGS 

I HAVE discovered the center of the universe. 
It is very wonderful and comforting, I am 
the center of the universe. In a minute this morn- 
ing this flashed on me, and the puzzle of the ages 
was solved. 

No more dispute as to whether the earth goes 
round the sun, or the sun round the earth, or both 
round the constellation of Hercules, for the whole 
cosmos revolves about me. I am the axis. 

When Proctor Knott extolled Duluth as the 
spot where the horizon comes down at equal dis- 
tance in every direction, he spoke the sober truth. 
I write these lines on a ship a thousand miles at 
sea ; all around is water and sky ; and right in the 
exact geographical center of everything am I and 
my ship. Come to think of it, this has always 
been the case, all my life. 

My father and mother existed for the purpose 
of bringing me into the world. The old Third 
Ward schoolhouse in Springfield, Illinois, was 

170 



THE CENTER OF THINGS 

built that I might attend there, and (it has since 
been torn down) learn to spell; indeed, the entire 
educational system came into being in order that I 
might go to that school. 

Emperors die in China, and kings are upset in 
Portugal; earthquakes shake Sicily and panics 
Wall Street, and all simply that the news thereof 
may be laid before me at the breakfast table. 

The big and the little dippers whirl about the 
polestar, Antares winks, and Venus glows, and 
Halley's comet comes and goes — for me. 

And in all this there is no egotism. For in say- 
ing I am the center of the cosmos I do not at all 
imply that you also are not the center of the 
cosmos. In fact, you are; everybody is. There 
are as many centers as there are conscious beings. 
The mistake we have made all along is in suppos- 
ing there can be but one center. If you look 
through a window pane covered with rain drops or 
frost crystals at a point of light, you will notice 
that any way you move your head the light always 
remains the center of innumerable concentric rings 
formed by the glistening reflections. It is even so 
in life, as you move the center moves. 

There are as many worlds as there are crea- 
tures. As Zangwill says: " The scent world of 

171 



LAME AND LOVELY 

dogs, the eye world of birds, the uncanny touch 
world of bats, the earth world of worms, the water 
world of fishes, the gyroscopic world of dancing 
mice, the flesh world of parasites, the microscopic 
world of microbes, intersect one another inextrica- 
bly and with an infinite interlacing, yet each is a 
symmetric sphere of being, a rounded whole, and 
to its denizens the sole and self-sufficient cosmos." 

The account of creation as given in the Penta- 
teuch is, therefore, psychologically and essentially 
correct; God did make the sun to give man light 
by day, and the moon and stars to shine on him 
by night, as far as man is concerned. 

If the Bible had been written for angels it might 
have stated the case differently. When the peni- 
tent at the mourner's bench is told that he will 
never find peace until he believes that the Son of 
God came to save him personally, he is told the 
plain truth; the meaning of which is that he is to 
move in from the suburbs into the center of crea- 
tion. 

For it is only when a soul feels the stars rise and 
fall about him orderly, angels and devils tugging 
at him, and all creation recognizing his geocentric 
supremacy, that he gets poise and ceases to be 
eccentric. Eccentric means, having the point 

172 



THE CENTER OF THINGS 

about which a wheel revolves at one side of the 
center. 

There are so many discontented, unhappy peo- 
ple in the world, simply because there are so many 
eccentric, lopsided, bumpy, flat-wheeled, irregular 
souls. Move in! Move in! Occupy your due 
place in the spotlight of destiny! Worms do it, 
why not you ? 

Philosophers have ridiculed this homocentric 
theory. Goethe turned from it in disgust. Pope 
wrote caustically: 

While man exclaims, " See all things for my use! " 
" See man for mine! " replies the pampered goose. 

But the instinct of humanity is wiser than the 
wisdom of the learned. Homer breathed truth 
when he represented the gods fighting for and 
against Troy. The Old Testament is right when 
it shows Jehovah actively interested in the chosen 
people. Every people is a chosen people, and 
there is no God but our own peculiar Jah or 
Elohim. 

And Jesus was most right and true of all when 
he had us appropriate, each one of us, the spe- 
cial care of the Father of All. There is no Prov- 
idence that is of any mortal use to me but Special 

173 



LAME AND LOVELY 

Providence ; if it is only general it had as well not 
be at all. It is precisely because He clothes the 
lilies of the field that He will also clothe you, O 
ye of little faith. Because He notes the sparrow 
He will note you. 

You have an inalienable right to your centricity. 
Occupy it. You cannot believe in God unless you 
believe He is yours* The only real God is my 
God. 



174 



THE THREE SPHINXES BY THE ROAD 

Nobility is not acquired by birth, but by life, 
often by death. — Plutarch. 

*' TV /TEN," says Pascal, " unable to find any 

1.VJL cure for death, misery and ignorance, 
have the notion that, to render themselves happy, 
they must not think of these things/* 

The real test of a wise man is suggested by th% 
paragraph. For a wise man is precisely one who 
has definitely settled his attitude toward, first, 
death ; second, failure ; and third, the unknown. 

No matter how much knowledge is in a man's 
head, how much skill in his hands, and how much 
purpose and force in his heart, he is still a fool 
unless he has met and arranged with the three 
great facts. 

Not that any man can understand one or all of 
these three mysteries. It is safe to say no man 
understands them. Since the beginning of human 
time they have sat like sphinxes by the roadside of 
every man's life. 

175 



LAME AND LOVELY 

But one can do better than understand, one can 
adjust one's self to them. 

After all, in anything, the truest wisdom is not 
knowledge, but adjustment. 

We do not know what electricity is, but we can 
adjust ourselves to it, we can use it, make it work, 
and cause it to serve us in the telegraphic wire in- 
stead of killing us in the lightning. So also we 
do not know what gravitation is, nor chemical 
affinity, nor life; but we can employ these mys- 
teries to our advantage. 

The last three mysteries of life, which men in 
general cannot use, and by which they are baffled 
and downcast, are those I have mentioned. To 
adjust ourselves to them implies the highest de- 
gree of intelligence and of moral power. 

First, death. Death is as natural as life. It 
is a certainty. How many people have settled 
with it? Sad to say, to most persons death comes 
as an awful calamity, a blow in the dark, an event 
that upsets all calculations and defeats all the aims 
of life. 

A wise man is one who is always as ready to die 
as to live; his books are in order, his business ar- 
ranged, and his thoughts are so set that death may 
come at any moment. No man who is not so 

176 



THE THREE SPHINXES BY THE ROAD 

has a right to call himself happy or intelligent. 

Second, failure or sickness. In whatever a man 
proposes, he ought to make definite plans what he 
will do in case he fails. 

Any fool can manage to get along with good 
health; only a wise man knows how to be ill. 

Any general can succeed if he invariably is vic- 
torious; the great general is the one who knows 
what to do when defeated. 

Third, ignorance. What one does not know is 
infinite, compared with what one knows. The 
supreme test of character is one's relation to the 
unknown. 

Out of the unknown come the plagues of life; 
for the unknown is the lair of the greatest enemy 
of life — fear. 

Out of the unknown issue fear of God, of 
spirits, of nature, of the dark, of fate, of disease. 

Properly adjusted to the unknown we have re- 
ligion, instead of superstition; our lives are made 
moral and brave and free, instead of base and 
cowardly and enslaved. 

The clear, scientific, religious mind sees clearly 
the difference between the things it can and cannot 
know; the untrained, low mind blurs the line be- 
tween known and unknown. This is the chief 

177 



LAME AND LOVELY 

distinction between the intelligent and the unintel- 
ligent thinker. 

Whoever, therefore, will have peace, poise and 
wisdom let him make definite arrangement with 
the three sphinxes — death, failure and the un- 
known. 



i 7 8 



THE HOUSE ON THE ROCK 
For their rock is not as our Rock. — Moses. 

THE history of mankind is the record of a 
huge experiment in getting together. 

Without organization we get none of the finer 
elements of life, such as orchestras and steam 
heat, cities, street cars, dictionaries and police. 

Pure individualism means barbarism. Each 
man dwells in his own cave with the woman he 
has taken. 

The struggle upward on the part of the race 
is merely a struggle to crush out those elements 
that prevent cooperation. 

Pride, lust, money-love, power-love and all 
forms of primal egoism disintegrate society, pre- 
vent unity, split all pacts of mutual help and are 
thus agents of savagery. 

They minister to primitive egoism, but they de- 
stroy the higher, finer and more permanent ego- 
ism; that is to say, while they seem to increase 
a man, yet in reality they eat him up. They make 

179 



LAME AND LOVELY 

him small, they narrow his nature, provincialize 
his ideas and push him back toward the brute. 
They are not forces of evolution, but of dissolu- 
tion. 

Now, therefore, almost all attempts at getting 
together, all efforts at organizing into states, 
churches, armies, cults, unions, and the like, have 
appealed to these primeval passions, which in their 
nature can never give solidity to bodies of men. 

The cementing passions are curious. For they 
seem at first glance to be anti-individualistic; to 
make for loss to me and gain to others. Really, 
when we come to try them out they increase and 
strengthen me. They are as a matter of fact, 
powerfully egoistic, only that quality is concealed 
in them; it takes time, faith, vision and spiritual 
regeneration to see it. 

For instance, take love-of-men, of men souls 
themselves, instead of the love of power over 
them. That seems to mean for me to annihilate 
self for others. Also take joy-in-work, and devo- 
tion-to-ideal, and delight-in-service. All of these 
seem to strike at self. We rebel against them 
with the instinct of self-defense. 

It is only when we reach a certain point of 
ripeness in experience, of maturity in wisdom and 

180 



THE HOUSE ON THE ROCK 

of power in spiritual insight, that we see through 
the shell to the kernel. 

It is then we perceive the actual truth of the 
saying that " he that saveth his life shall lose it, 
and he that loseth his life shall find it." 

For we learn by and by that only as we put 
away the cruder egoisms of lust, money-love, 
pride, the desire to be master, the hate of service 
and so on, do we come to a sweeter, wider, nobler 
egoism; we come indeed to some sort of true ap- 
preciation of our own souls and of their worth 
to us and the world. 

Only through altruism, only by the path of 
altruism, do we reach a sound individualism. 

In the highest realm of character altruism 
and egoism mean the same thing. They blend. 
They make the full harmony, the white light of 
souls. 

All those institutions, therefore, that are founded 
upon the sands of crude egoisms must perish. 
The state that means mere defense, the church 
that stands for rescuing the elect " as brands from 
the burning," the schools whose aim is to make 
scholars and gentlemen apart from the vulgar 
crowd, the business world which has for a motive 
to make me rich and independent and separate 

181 



LAME AND LOVELY 

from my fellows, are on rotting piers and will go 
down in time. 

Jesus was right. Human society must be 
built on the abiding altruistic motives; only so 
shall " the gates of hell not prevail against it." 
Nietzsche was shortsighted and superficial, 
Tolstoi was right. Disarmament is right. 

Only as we dare to trust the altruistic laws, only 
as we fearlessly build our institutions on them, 
only as we have a practical, bold faith in the 
cosmic energy of love and trust, and an unshakable 
belief that men will respond to it, in spite of what 
they say, only so can we permanently get together 
and build our houses upon the rock. 



182 



THE DECLARATION OF 
INDEPENDENCE 

The only true courage is against fate. 

— Lady Somery. 

THE Declaration of Independence by the 
nation is not of much importance unless each 
citizen of the nation issues and abides by his own 
personal declaration of independence. 

Join me, therefore, in this my declaration: 

I deny that there is any such thing as chance 
or luck. I affirm that the universe is managed 
by an intelligent person. I can see only a little 
way, but as far as I do see all is law; that is just 
ground for believing that all is law everywhere. 
I say a Person manages the universe, because my 
experience furnishes me no grounds for conceiv- 
ing of an intelligence apart from personality. 

I deny that God is ever under any circum- 
stances my enemy. I affirm He is always my 
friend. 

I deny that there is any caprice in the moral 

183 



LAME AND LOVELY 

or spiritual world. I affirm the cosmic accuracy 
of the laws that govern souls. 

I deny that there is so much as one grain of 
truth in premonitions. 

I deny that fear ever does any good. I affirm 
that the sensation of fear is always poison, to 
be resisted with all my might. Whatever comes, 
I shall meet it better unafraid. 

I deny that heredity has done anything to me 
or to any person which we cannot turn to our 
good. I affirm that the original heredity is that 
I am a son of God, and that this inherited good 
spirit, if we can realize it, is stronger than any 
bad blood. 

I deny that environment is stronger than I, 
I affirm that I can make any possible environment 
serve my success. 

I deny that happiness is a worthy aim of life. 
I affirm that I am put here to become great, not to 
be happy. 

I deny that any soul that is heroic is ever in 
its depths unhappy. I affirm that joy is the in- 
variable accompaniment of fearlessness, truth 
and loyalty. 

I deny that any habit, instinct or taste is 
stronger than I. I affirm that I can change these, 

184 



DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 

and that the changing of them is all there is to 
culture and progress. 

I deny that money has ever either aided or 
impeded the power of truth and of good in the 
world. I affirm that the only spiritual dynamic 
is personality. 

I affirm that religion is nothing except the 
personal influence of God, and that progress is 
nothing except the personal influence of good 
people. 

I deny that I am "a worm of the dust." I 
affirm that I am as important as the rest of the 
universe. 

I deny that death ends all. I affirm that my 
personality shall live on after the dissolution of 
my body. I affirm that the belief that the hu- 
man soul ceases to exist at death is the most 
profoundly immoral of all beliefs. 

I affirm that this world was made for lovers; 
that whoso misses love misses life; that loyal love 
is tougher than all hates, envies and malice, and 
will eventually overcome them. 

I deny that " as I have made my bed I must 
lie in it." I affirm that " if I have made my bed 
wrong, please God, I will make it again." 

I deny that opportunity knocks at every man's 

i8 5 



LAME AND LOVELY 

door but once. I affirm that every day is an op- 
portunity. 

I deny that it is worth while to seek to be rich, 
to be famous, or to occupy great place. These 
things are gambling chances. 

I affirm that the one thing worth seeking is that 
work which seems play. Only in doing that work 
is a human being sound, sane and content. 

I deny any authority whatever over my mind. 

I affirm that I am absolutely bound to do what 
seems right to me. 

I affirm that my personal well-being is best pro- 
moted by striving for the well-being of others. 

I can prove none of these things. They are 
axiomatic to me. There is nothing more self- 
evident by which to prove them. 



186 



SALVATION BY RESPONSIBILITY 

He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and 
he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap. 

— The Preacher. 

FIRST, what is salvation? 
It may mean several things; it has been 
used to mean making sure of the entrance of 
one's soul into heaven. 

Of that meaning I have nothing here to say. 
I use the word in another sense, the modern sense 
of making one's character strong, so that one is 
master of one's passions, freed from fear, and 
happily adjusted to the universe. In other words, 
one is sure of one's self, and a source of strength 
and joy to others. 

This kind of salvation, however it may be with 
any other kind, never is attained except by one 
thing — Responsibility. 

A saved arm is an arm that is muscular and 
skillful, a saved leg is one you can run and kick 
with, a saved mind is one that thinks clearly. 

187 



LAME AND LOVELY 

Each of these is saved by peril, burden and effort. 

Protecting, coddling, and shielding them, only 
makes them flabby and weak. 

This is the law of life. The woman that is 
most really saved is the woman who bears and 
rears a large family of children. They mean 
burden, anxiety, labor, self-giving, often agony, 
always responsibility. And those are the things 
that save a woman; save her from being petty, 
dissatisfied, useless and bad. 

The noblest women I ever knew have been 
those who have launched young lives. The most 
magnificent soul that can be grown on this earth 
is a mother. 

We all want to " help " boys. Yet that which 
makes a boy great is that which hinders him. 
Many a promising lad needs only to be kicked 
out, battered, discouraged, and opposed, to make 
a man of him. 

Not that we should abuse boys. We shall help 
them. But this old world, and nature, and des- 
tiny, intend to haze him, to attack him, and to 
roll him in the mud. 

And if that rough treatment arouses him to 
fight and win, he will be saved. Our safeguard- 
ing does not save. 

188 



SALVATION BY RESPONSIBILITY 

Girls, it is commonly supposed, are to be 
screened, protected. A girl, however, that has 
always been carefully kept from all temptations 
and responsibility, may be a very sweet, nice girl, 
but she will not be a great woman. 

Some of the purest souls I ever knew were Sal- 
vation Army lassies, who grappled with vice and 
uncleanness daily. 

One of the noblest souls I ever knew was a 
vaudeville actress, who began life as a waif, strug- 
gled up single-handed, and kept herself unspotted. 

One way to save a soul is to pack it in cotton 
and keep it in a glass globe. Another way is to 
render it antiseptic and send it forth into an un- 
toward world. 

What modern souls want is not to be secure. 
They want to be great. 

Any theology can tell you what to do to be se- 
cure; if you care for that. 

But there is only one way to be great, to have 
strength that can be depended upon in a crisis, 
to have the kind of happiness that cannot be 
bowled over by calamity, to have the kind of 
faith that doubts strengthen and do not disturb, 
and to have the kind of purity that comes from 
wisdom and not from ignorance; and that way is 

189 



LAME AND LOVELY 

to accept responsibilities, grapple them, and bear 
them nobly. 

Then you are safe as a fearless warrior is safe. 

The other way you are safe as a man in a 
cyclone cellar is safe. 



190 



LOVE THE TEST OF LIFE 
Love is the best of moralists. — Bacon. 

LOVE is the test of life. It tries every soul. 
And it finds so much dross in us that it is a 
wonder it stays with us at all. 

When love comes it demands nobleness. It 
sounds the trumpet for every high thought and 
feeling in us to rally. 

It smites every base thing in us. It refuses to 
live in peace with meanness, selfishness or sor- 
didness of any kind. 

That is why so few people are capable of a 
great love. They are not worthy of it. To be 
sure, all of us have some of the tricks and imita- 
tions of love; for love is so good a thing that if 
we cannot have it we must have a pewter dupli- 
cate of it. When men cannot see God they make 
idols. 

So we all have sex attraction. We treasure 
up flatteries and fair words, kisses and gifts and 
compliments: and these trinkets, ear-rings and 

191 



LAME AND LOVELY 

shifts of love are the only things many of us un- 
derstand. 

But love itself is as shattering as God. Love 
is a revealer. It is a revelation. It is blinding 
vision. 

/ For, have you not seen how, when a youth falls 
in love, his first persuasion is of his utter unworthi- 
ness? He is not fit to touch her glove. Every 
little vileness of his p#st rises to scorn him. He 
is crushed under a vast humiliation. That she will 
smile on him is a miracle; and he is ashamed, 
feeling that if she but knew him through and 
1 through she would flee. 

Marriage is so often a failure because they two 
try to keep love without greatness of soul. The 
only happy, contented marriages among petty 
souls are those of indifference and convenience. 
To love, and not to be noble, means tragedy. 

Love wars with egotism. No egotist can love. 
For love is the very soul of altruism. It means 
self-sinking, self-forgetfulness, self-obliteration. 
It passes over and sees a self worthy of honor 
only in the person of the beloved. 

Love cannot dwell with pride. Its pith and 
marrow is humility. Any preening and perking 
up of self it abhors. It will not claim its own 

19? 



LOVE THE TEST OF LIFE 

rights. Its joy is surrender, and not conquest. It 
is great in meekness, after the manner of true 
greatness. It always " takes upon itself the form 
of a servant, and learns obedience." It refuses 
thrones. It washes feet. 

Love gives, gives, gives. It never can give 
enough. Its climax of happiness is when it can 
give life itself. Its triumph is crucifixion. 

Love transfigures. It renders the beloved ob- 
ject beautiful. Love does not spring from 
beauty; a thing is beautiful because it is loved. 

So we see why love means such misery. It is 
a divine fire among earthly stubble. It comes to 
us; we leap to it; for it is the most glorious of 
all things; and then we discover its fatal require- 
ment. Alas! we must be good, and we must be 
great. We fail. We go broken to our graves, 
hoping for a life beyond, where we may measure 
up to love. 

That is, most of us do this. Some put away 
great love entirely. They choose littleness, be- 
cause it is comfortable. They settle down to 
pleasant lives; cultured swine, intellectual cattle, 
more or less brainy beasts. 

Still, though many strive with it and are 
wrecked, and others give it up, love goes on, al- 

193 



LAME AND LOVELY 

mighty, inborn in every new child, inherent in 
humanity. It is our redemption and our torment. 
It is eternal. For it is God. God flowing, burst- 
ing up, heaving in tidal waves in the souls of men. 

Suppressed here, it rises yonder. Silenced in 
one place its vocal harmonies break out in a hun- 
dred new places. Love almighty is God almighty. 
It is that breath which God breathed into the nos- 
trils of the dust He had fashioned, and man be- 
came a living soul. 

Heaven and Hell are but love's flame and 
shadow reflected upon the infinite. 



194 



THE TEETH AND CLAWS OF AL- 
TRUISM 

Behind the idea of justice always lurks the idea 
of force. — De Tocqueville. 

AS civilization becomes more and more com- 
plex, justice must become more and more 
fundamental. Among simple people, in antique 
and ignorant eras", security was possible by force. 
The mediaeval baron lived safe in his castle at 
home and in his harness in the field by the mere 
process of keeping the common people cowed. 
His walls and his soldiers were his sure support 
and defense. He alone had the power to destroy. 
He could hurt his people and hang or chop them; 
they could not touch him. 

Times have changed. The invention of high 
explosives has rendered all walls obsolete. Even 
guards, armies and police are insufficient nowa- 
days to protect a king. Bombs are cheap, and 
a dollar buys a revolver good enough to slay 
an emperor. The machinery of destruction is in 

195 



LAME AND LOVELY 

the hands of the proletariat. The power to hurt 
has passed from duke and doge over to the 
cobbler and the plasterer. 

Every assassination of a royal person contains 
this lesson. There is safety no more in high 
places, except as there is justice in low places. 

" Be wise now therefore, O ye kings, and be 
instructed, ye judges of the earth. Kiss the peo- 
ple, lest they be angry and ye perish from the 
way when their wrath is kindled but a little." 

The rise of democracy has been accompanied 
with the growth of the terrific power of private 
vengeance. The other edge of democracy, its cut- 
ting edge, is the power of " one of the least of 
these, my brethren," to kill. Along with the doc- 
trines of altruism and universal brotherhood comes 
the manufacture of fulminates, dynamite, nitro- 
glycerin and all the black brothers of the out- 
raged. 

And there is no refuge from this menace ex- 
cept justice. And not occasional justice, such as 
of courts and arbitration boards and special com- 
mittees, but bottom justice which reaches to the 
basic equities, which indeed must utterly reor- 
ganize the social arrangement. 

Every man must have a fair chance. No child 
196 



TEETH AND CLAWS OF ALTRUISM 

shall under any circumstances have an unearned 
preference over another. Bringing one child into 
the world in the slums and feeding him on refuse, 
alcohol and lust, and bringing another child into 
the world in luxury and feeding him on milk and 
honey and love; this injustice must cease. All 
privilege, caste, every species of unfairness must 
stop. 

So preaches the mild Jesus. So runs the gentle 
gospel. 

But behind the flowers and perfume of this 
appeal of goodness is an iron horror, a thing with 
teeth and claws and fire-heart that says the same 
thing. 

Let us be fair and just and love our neighbor 
and we will feel better. Quite so. But there is 
a hell side as well as a heaven side to every true 
preachment. Let us abide in unfairness, injustice 
and selfishness, and out of the pit of wrong and 
darkness by the side of which we feast shall come 
fire balls and cyanic vapors. * 

Wherever there is injustice there is danger. 
Wherever there is wrong there is concealed hell 
fire. Every oppression means an explosion. Ev- 
ery graft and connivance of roguery means, some 
time, somewhere, agony and heartbreak. 

197 



LAME AND LOVELY 

" Wherefore hear the word of the Lord, ye 
sorrowful men that rule this people. 

" Because ye have said, We have made a cov^ 
enant with death and with hell are we at agree- 
ment; therefore thus saith the Lord: 

" ' Behold, judgment will I lay to the line, and 
righteousness to the plummet; and the hail shall 
sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters 
shall overflow your hiding place. And your cov- 
enant with death shall be disannulled, and your 
agreement with death shall not stand/ " 



198 



IMITATION IN RELIGION 

The customs of a people are their motive 
power. — Duclos. 

THERE is nothing more imitative than our 
religious experience; nothing that seems to 
ourselves more profoundly original; nothing in 
which we follow more closely the footsteps of 
others. 

By this I do not mean to imply that our re- 
ligious feelings are not genuine. Quite the con- 
trary. We can be as sincere in a suggested 
emotion as in a spontaneous emotion. 

I believe in the religious feeling. I believe it 
to be the highest functioning of the human in- 
telligence. But I am of those who labor to free 
it from ignorance, irrationality and base alloy, and 
to get it properly set in its true psychological 
place. Religion is not the private property of 
the church; it belongs to mankind; it doubtless 
exists in the house of God, but it is also in the 
outdoors of God, and there's a lot more outdoor 

199 



LAME AND LOVELY 

space in the universe than there ever will be house 
room. I sympathize with and love all honest re- 
ligious feeling. 

But most of the feelings of any kind which we 
think our very own are imitative. The lover feels 
about as he has heard and read that others feel; 
the instinct is his own, its form is mimicked. We 
get angry at those things at which a man is sup- 
posed to get angry. A young Albanian private 
in the Turkish army the other day was executed 
for stabbing his captain, who had slapped his face. 
His defense was that his people always killed 
those who slapped their faces. He was willing to 
die to keep step with a racial impulse. 

We eat and drink under the dictates of tastes 
which are copied. When we go to Marseilles 
we eat bouillabaisse, at Strasbourg we eat pate de 
foie gras, at Budapest we eat goulash, at Naples 
we eat macaroni, in Germany we eat limburger 
cheese and sauerkraut, down South we eat hot 
biscuit, and in Boston we eat beans; and in each 
instance good livers can throw themselves into a 
genuine imitative craving and relish for the spe- 
cific dish of the locality. The most accomplished 
gourmets are those with the most adaptable pal- 
ates. 

200 



I : H 



IMITATION IN RELIGION 

We build our houses to suit certain notions of 
personal comfort which we have inherited from 
our people or absorbed from our environments. 
When we travel we consult Baedeker or follow 
the suggestions of friends in selecting the places 
where we are to let our enthusiasm loose. 

So, looking back, I can see how all my early 
religious experiences were run into molds ready- 
made for me by my surroundings. I was not sat- 
isfied until I had all the forms of emotion others 
said they had. When I awoke to this fact I was 
at first inclined to doubt the genuineness of my 
feelings, but more mature reflection brought me 
about to see that, while the manners and shapes 
of my sentiments were copied, the core and gist 
of them was truly my own, the moving of a deep, 
entirely individual and personal instinct witftin 
me. 

Does not this explain some peculiar religious 
phenomena? For instance, the permanence of 
religious institutions, the fixity of creeds, the long 
life of churches, generation after generation 
growing up and passing through the same forms 
of faith ? 

Does it not explain, also, the remarkable 
spread, the epidemic nature of new religions, how 

201 



LAME AND LOVELY 

they seem to catch and go like fire, increasing in 
arithmetical progression? 

And does it not explain, also, the slow progress 
of trying to apply rational, scientific methods to 
religious thought? It requires the constant effort 
of reformers, prophets, saints and heroes to keep 
religion from hardening into empty form, or run- 
ning away into a travestied sentimentality, and to 
keep it near to the individual, genuine truth. 

Religion is eternal, because it is human. All 
churches are true, in a way. The Jew, the Cath- 
olic, the Protestant, the Christian Scientist, each 
is trying out, in the long experiment of years, 
some particular phase of the truth. Each doubt- 
less will have a part in forming that sweet and 
reasonable religion, that rational, intelligent, per- 
fect attitude toward the infinite which our chil- 
dren's children shall count not the least among 
the treasures we have wrought for them with 
our highest effort — the religion of to-morrow. 



202 



DO THE MEEK MAKE GOOD? 

Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the 
earth. — Jesus. 

A GENTLEMAN writes that a magazine has 
offered a framed motto, " Blessed Are the 
Meek," to any meek person who has made good. 
He wants me to answer this. 

One cannot answer a joke, much less a covert 
sneer. But if any cares to think clearly about 
meekness I can point the way. 

The question is, what does it mean to make 
good? If it means to get on, then meekness is 
silly. If it means to become great, then meekness 
is the only way. 

If to make good means to have some feudal 
master of dollars notice you, promote you or en- 
dow you by his royal will or pleasure ; if it means 
to win in the gamble of business; if it means cur- 
rying favor with the vested interests until you 
are made leading citizen of the village or judge 
of the court; if it means scheming, fawning and 

203 



LAME AND LOVELY 

handshaking until you are elected governor of the 
state or bishop of the church; if it means spending 
millions in printer's ink and upon billboards until 
you make the multitude buy your brand of hats 
or soups or pianos; if it means what is commonly 
meant by success, to-wit, prominence, notoriety 
or wealth, then the meek do not make good. 

But if by making good is meant to become 
strong, sane and sure in soul, wise and clear in 
mind, sweet and wholesome in character, with 
your own life full of peace and poise, and with 
your whole influence a help and inspiration to 
those who know you, then nobody ever does make 
good save the meek. 

Jesus said, " the meek shall inherit the earth." 
To understand that you have to know what meek- 
ness is. It is not timidity, cowardice, servility 
and such tempers. It is — Humility. 

And what is humility? It is the wish to be 
great and the dread of being called great. It is 
the wish to help and the dread of thanks. It is 
the love of service and the distaste for rule. It 
is trying to be good and blushing when caught 
at it. It is loyalty to truth and reality, and hate 
of sham and seeming. 

In all the real things of life it is only the meek 
204 



DO THE MEEK MAKE GOOD? 

who inherit. In love it is the meek who sit upon 
thrones and it is the proud who bow down to 
them; in art it is the meek alone who have eyes to 
see the shy secrets of nature and the grace to fitly 
interpret them; in science it is the meek alone 
who have the subtle instinct for truth; in good- 
ness it is only the meek who have that rare flower 
of unconscious purity, and in life's sterner affairs, 
before the furies of sickness, failure, calumny and 
death, it is only the meek who stand calm and 
ready, while the braggarts tremble, whine or flee. 

Who of us, in his serious hour, would not 
rather be found worthy to stand beside old Soc- 
rates, poisoned like a rat in a hole, and Jesus, 
hung up to die between two thieves, and Lincoln, 
shot down like a dog, than to be brother to the last 
devious money lord or political baron who has 
schemed and bludgeoned his way to the kingship 
of these times? 

To furnish the cheapest kind of prize to all 
the meek who make good would bankrupt a mil- 
lionaire. For all over the world, among simple 
folk, " unwept, unhonored and unsung," each 
faithful in his small corner, are myriads of brave, 
helpful souls, who suppose themselves to be noth- 
ing, who would be amazed if told there is any- 

205 



LAME AND LOVELY 

thing noble about them, yet who are facing life's 
responsibilities bravely and death's terrors un- 
afraid and the unknown to-morrow with cheer 
and strong hearts. No prize of men or maga- 
zines can reach them, for they hide ; but they wear 
unseen the crown of wild olive, for all that, and 
unto them shall be given the morning star. 

They are like God; for, have you never no- 
ticed? God is so shy and humble and hidden that 
the humbugs don't believe He exists ! God never 
seems to make good, until the centuries have their 
say. 



206 



WIDENING 

Rien ne ressemble moins a Vhomme qu'un 
homme — Nothing less resembles mankind than 
a man. — Balzac. 

I KNOW a woman who is a perpetual child. 
She retains all the childish strong love of 
them that love her and hate of them that hate her. 
And she makes no bones of it. She never tries to 
dye her likes and dislikes with color of justifica- 
tion, but is frank, open and above board slap-me- 
and-I'll-slap-you, and kiss-me-and-I'll-kiss-you. 

And I don't know but she gets along about as 
well as those of us who try to be just and fair in 
our emotions. 

For I have walked about in the mess of men 
and the ways of women some years and have ob- 
served, and my conclusion is that when all's said 
and done most of our instincts are downright 
primitive. 

A soul wriggles a good deal, like a wobbly 
arrow, but as a rule it speeds from the bow of 

207 



LAME AND LOVELY 

the cradle to the target of the grave in just about 
the trajectory which the hand that shot it de- 
signed it to take. 

In plain prose, we are born with a bunch of 
tendencies and our days are spent in working them 
out. 

We keep imitating and imitating other people 
whom we admire, but it is only a business of try- 
ing on successive suits till we find one that fits 
us. For we never permanently come under the 
influence of any one who is not just spiritually 
adapted to our own self. 

So we say such a poet, author, actor, man or 
woman, " finds " us. Which simply means that 
such person helps us express our self. 

We like a certain preacher, for instance. 
Why? Because he says what we think. We read 
a certain author with pleasure because he helps 
us give form to convictions we already have. So 
Lord Bacon shrewdly said he wrote a book to tell 
men what they had always known. 

The soul is a narcissus that loves only those 
other souls which are as pools on which it can see 
the reflections of itself. 

As life deepens we find in ourselves more and 
more of the multiplicity of humanity. And so we 

208 



WIDENING 

love more and more kinds of men and different 
traits of men. 

It is herein that the sage differs from the petty- 
soul. He has come into a broad sympathy with 
humanity because he has become more widely hu- 
man. He sees that in himself are all crimes and 
all sanctities. 

Hence with the saint on his knees, drunk with 
ideal holiness, the wise man is not shocked nor 
has any contempt, but he says amen to any whitest 
prayer, and with the drunkard, the thief and the 
murderer he has no bitter words of abhorrence, 
because in his own soul he has felt these swift 
shadows and poison, desperate darkness of them, 
and he wants to put his hand on the wretch's hand 
and say, in pity and humbleness — My brother ! 

So it is a straight way from the direct and 
childish soul that slaps back and kisses back, up 
to the serene character of the great soul that loves 
all and forgives all. 

It is all a matter of more humanity, more life, 
more inner resources, more wealth of personal 
development. 

A great man is like a wide sea and laves the 
shore of all continents and kinds of men. He 
loves all because he is akin to all. 

209 



LAME AND LOVELY 

Jesus said to the woman taken in adultery: 
" Neither do I condemn thee " ; to the thief on 
the cross: " This day shalt thou be with me in 
Paradise"; to God, speaking of his murderers: 
" Father, forgive them, for they know not what 
they do." 

The difference is one of degree. The little 
soul sees itself only here and there among men. 
The great soul (which we call divine) sees itself 
in all mankind. 

The child and the savage love their benefac- 
tors; intellectual people love their kind; saints 
love the brethren; sinners love their sort; the 
Jah of the Hebrews loved the chosen people; the 
God of the middle ages loved the elect; Jesus 
loved the world. 



210 



JESUS OUT OF DOORS 

The same day went Jesus out of the house, and 
sat by the seaside. — Matthew. 

WE can never understand Jesus until we get 
him away from the Temple. 

It is when he steps from the altar and goes with 
us to the home, the workshop and the seaside, that 
we perceive his supreme significance to life. 

And he is so much more splendid when we 
take him out of formulas of salvation, and walk 
with him along the ways of days. 

The modern man, growing less and less sensi- 
tive to the appeal of ritual and authority, finds, 
like the two upon the road to Emmaus, that his 
heart burns within him, as he talks with Jesus out 
of doors. 

Jesus out of doors, free from the stuffy air and 
stuffier ideas of the " meeting house "; Jesus, not 
a wooden part of a wooden scheme, but a luminous, 
warm Teacher; Jesus, unwrapped from the spicy 
grave-clothes of heathen rites, and treading with 

211 



LAME AND LOVELY 

us the meadows of modern thought, with eternal 
springtime in his look; Jesus, descending from 
the incense-swathed niche and the light of candles, 
into the open of life and literature; Jesus, with 
his scepter of authority laid by, ruling now by the 
inspiration of his word ; Jesus, with the " many 
crowns" of kingship removed, crowns he never 
wanted, but which the ignorant enthusiasm of a 
king-infested age forced upon him, thrice as un- 
welcome to the real grandeur of his soul as the 
Crown of Thorns; Jesus, coming among us with 
the genuine greatness of his character, and 
stripped of the artificial greatness of thrones, 
dignities, and robes, great in vision and wisdom 
and love, and relieved of soul-killing superstition ; 
this Jesus is one whose leadership rests not upon 
his birth, nor prophecies, nor miracles, nor the 
conclusions of logic, nor the authority of Church 
and State, nor Tradition; but, with a fair field and 
no favor, by sheer virtue of his dominant person- 
ality and ideas, easily outstrips all competitors in 
the race for mastery. 

What a joy to him it must be to know that he 
has ceased to be a battle-cry for the fierce passions 
of war, is ceasing to be the bone of contention 
between sects, and is coming to be the symbol of 

212 



JESUS OUT OF DOORS 

individual nobleness and social brotherliness every- 
where ! 

The clash of theological discussion has died 
away; people have lost interest in the mighty 
themes that once rent nations; religious bigotry, 
and its shadow, irreligious bigotry, have practi- 
cally disappeared; vast libraries of religious dis- 
pute and speculation molder away, read no more ; 
ancient institutions are crumbling, upheld only by 
enormous endowments; yet in all this downfall 
and decay we see no diminution of the real mastery 
of Jesus over the thought of mankind. 

Only to him can the altruist appeal as to one 
having those far dreams of perfect beauty for the 
race. In him only, of all masters, the working- 
man finds those ideals of dynamic power and seed 
persistence that insure the downfall of all tyran- 
nies. He alone stands in the ultimate ways of 
all political economy. What God may be we 
cannot tell, but up to this day no figure but that of 
Jesus stands between us and our loftiest, sweetest 
conception of God, " like an angel in the sun." 
And of all the world's great teachers he alone 
remains with us in the mist and dark of death, and 
whispers: " It is I. Be not afraid! " 

In endowed pulpits doubtless they are still dron- 
213 



LAME AND LOVELY 

ing upon the themes of Trinitarianism and Uni- 
tarianism ; but the modern mind cares not whether 
he was human, divine, or myth. It asks, What is 
he ? not What was he ? 

Because the question to-day is, What does he, 
or any man, or God, mean to my character ? We 
have lost interest in salvation beyond the grave. 
Now, as in the New Testament, it is a scarcely 
mentioned topic. 

We are interested in life here, power and depth 
of life, that " eternal quality " of life, without 
which any " eternal duration " would be as insuf- 
ferable in Angelico's Heaven as in Orcagna's Hell. 

And for purposes of character-making, inspi- 
ration, wisdom, purity, holiness and nobility, we 
need the Ideal Jesus. So long as the Ideal is 
here we care not by what avenues it comes. It 
came through the New Testament. It might have 
come through Goethe, Plutarch or Victor Hugo, 
only it did not. The point is that to the modern 
mind it is the fact of Jesus, his teachings, his 
life-story, the mental picture of him and his 
fecundating thoughts, and not the vehicle through 
which this fact has come to us, that is important. 



214 



JESUS OUT OF DOORS 

The little Christ that lay on Mary's breast, 
The babe the mediaeval mind caressed, 

Is not my Jesus ; mine's a new-born hope 
That builds each morn within my life its nest. 

The Christ that once in ancient Galilee 
Strewed golden parables beside the sea, 
Is not my Lord ; he vaster walks to-day 
The avenues of souls, and talks with me. 

That Christ between two thieves there on the hill 
Is not the Son of God we helped to kill ; 

In slum and prison, nailed twixt law and lust, 
Hangs the dim horror of our common will. 

There was no Christ, I say ! That thorn-set brow 
Was not, but is, eternally and now ! 

Up through the hate of centuries he bears 
The unwilling world to love, we know not how. 



215 



BY THE AUTHOR OF THIS BOOK 

HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

BY 

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BY THE AUTHOR OF THIS BOOK 



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